12th July 2016 | for Creatives | writing, writer-reader relationship, editing, rewriting, Lucienne Diver |
"The most important thing is to tell your story the way it needs to be told without shortchanging the reader or keeping gratuitous bits that could be streamlined to keep the pace moving."
"A writer should never give readers information they don't need. In any given story it's either important or it isn't, and it's my job to feel out the difference."
"You have to be ruthless. There comes a point when you know in your gut something just isn't working, or isn't as good as it should be."
"What I've found over the years is that I've never regretted anything I've ditched—I've only regretted the stuff I've left in."
"Imagine sentences instead of writing them... Keep them imaginary until you're happy with them. Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision. Accept no provisional sentences. Make no drafts. And no draft sentences. Bring the sentence you're working on as close to its final state as you can before you write it down and after. Think of composition and revision as the same thing."
"Read the first five pages. Count clichés. If you find one, the buzzer goes off: it's not a serious novel. A serious novelist notices clichés and eliminates them. The serious novelist doesn't write 'quiet as a mouse' or paint the world in clichéd moral terms. You could almost just substitute the adjective 'cliché-free' for 'serious.'"
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