Know Your Achilles Heel, Edit Accordingly
Bad habits, we’ve all got them.
And that’s okay 🙂 when it comes to the bad habits in one’s writing, you are in the unique position where you get endless do-overs. Before you release your brain-babies into the wild, you get to carve, polish and refine them to your heart’s content. The flip side of this is, you are almost always too close to your work. “A face that only a mother could love” most definitely applies to artists and their creations, perhaps moreso.
With that in mind, when it comes time to tweak your writing, my advice is this: identify your weaknesses. Find the ways that you frequently break the rules, look at lazy habits that you might have gathered along the way. Case in point, I know that I’m shocking with passive voice, throw cliches around like confetti, and my endings almost always have to be thrown out and rewritten. But right after typing “THE END”, that creative post-coital glow sets in, and like everyone else I can see no wrong in my child. I’m a genius, it’s perfect, and naught need be changed.
BOLLOCKS. I’m as awful as I’ve always been, and committed almost all of the writing sins I swore off last time. My recommended process is to go off, have a cuppa, hell, take a week or two off if I can. Stuff the hubris and ego back under the stairs. Then I look at my slab of word-vomit with fresh eyes, and unleash the editing chainsaw. Next step is to find that Achilles Heel, and carve it up like Leatherface.
“Just a second, I’m in the middle of this edit.”