StorytimeWednesday

  Your first draft if finished, now walk away for at least a day or two before you begin your editing process. If you can't afford to hire a professional editor to clean up your project, then you'll have to do it yourself. When I first started writing it took me ages to get the first page written because I kept rereading the page and editing, changing, and redefining the sentences. Finally, my writing mentor who was a previously published novelist who I adore finally got fed up with me during one of his biweekly catch-up phone calls to me when he asked how many pages I got written in the previous two weeks. My response was one page, and my reasoning was that the grammar and wording just didn't sound right to me. He snapped at me and gave me the best advice any writer could receive, stop editing and get the story out of your head and onto the paper or laptop in my case. Editing comes later. It's serious writing time. Now hang up the phone and get to writing and you bette...

    Grammar is for editors Many writers prevent themselves from finishing a book or script because they’re hung up on editing their story for proper English grammar. Guess what, that’s not your job. Your job is to create the characters, the storyline, the plots, the ending and most of all the flow of words that describe all of the above. Your job is not to concentrate on the grammar, you’re not an English teacher grading a paper for some student. Thinking about grammar and how it looks on paper is the editor’s job not yours. As I stated in my last post “get the story out of your head”, concentrate on the story and forget about the grammar until you’re done with the book. You can worry about how it sounds or inserting grammar once you’re in a position to reread the draft. Trust me when I say you will go through a minimum of 4 drafts before you are done, so you’ll catch any grammatical errors along the way and you can fix them as you find them at that point. In the meantime, jus...