The first editing run-through has been done. We now have a solid chunk of story to work with now. It still may not be completely in order, or even have all the right parts yet… but I’m not worried about that right now. Now… it’s time to break out the chisel… .get to working on cleaning up the shape and structure.
I generally do this step backwards. The reason for this, is because we’re working on spelling and grammar. Reading sentences and words in the order they’re meant to be read… is counter intuitive to this procedure, because our brains will fill in mistakes… add words that need to be there, and generally overlook the things we’re looking for.
Reading/editing backwards forces your brain into the unfamiliar… where the right words don’t follow the word you just read… where sentences make absolutely no sense. But it’s so much easier to pick out the double ‘the the’, where before, our brain just filtered one out. While our word processor is great at picking out incorrectly spelled words and giving us a remedial grammar correction here or there, it’s still better to make a sweep to find things such as the: to, too; there, their, they’re; it’s and its and even things as simple as adding the period at the end of a sentence or correct punctuation for dialog.
While this step can be rough the first few times… it gets easier with practice… and, because the next step is pretty much automated… I jump right to it…
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