You want to learn to write, so you sit down and write something. Writer’s likely call what you wrote an “ugly first draft;” that’s is not a criticism; it’s what we all write. And it’s what we all should write—no editing while getting that first draft on paper. But doing it doesn’t make you a writer, although it’s an essential first step. There are 7 more steps. With a lot of practice doing them consciously, you will find that eventually you will do them unconsciously, even in that first draft, so that there will be much less to edit.
- The Literal Mind Edit: Read through that ugly first draft with a very literal mind. Do the words you wrote mean what you intended them to mean? Are there pronouns with no or confusing antecedents? Are there dangling modifiers? Is it written in a logical order? Did you write complete sentences when you should have?
- No antecedent: “This part should be repaired first.” Have you made sure that the reader knows which is “this part?”
- Dangling modifier: She wore a bikini when she drove her white convertible, with polka dots.
- Use strong Verbs and Nouns: Read again and look for adverbs and adjectives and see how many you can eliminate with stronger verbs and nouns. Almost always replace “to be” verbs with stronger ones. And keep your verbs in the same tense; don’t shift from present to past and back again. Dialogue, of course, is present tense regardless.
- Dialogue: If there is dialogue, see how many ”he saids” you can eliminate with careful punctuation and paragraphing. Where they must stand, find better words for “said” some of the time. The rule about putting each speaker in a new paragraph and skipping the “he saids” has to be modified with common sense. Each speaker must be clearly in character, saying something that no one else in the piece would say. If there is any possibility for confusion, tell the reader who’s talking.
- Show, Don’t Tell: Fix the places where you fell in love with your beautiful adjectives, descriptions, and mood settings and forgot to apply that.
- Emotions: Read it out loud. Smooth out sentences that do not communicate clearly and swiftly. Can you hear that you are evoking the emotions in the reader that you intended?
- No Unneeded Words: At every step eliminate unnecessary words. It is not unusual to get rid of two or three hundred words out of every thousand.
- Punctuation: Probably the spell checker fixed the spelling (unless you used the wrong homonym) and by this time the grammar is nearly perfect. It’s time to question the commas, apostrophes, and other members of the punctuation team. Don’t be ashamed to resolve your uncertainties by research. You have to learn to do it right at some point.