Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Marring

Striving to better, oft we mar what's well - Shakespeare

This is how I often feel about editing. Sometimes when I’ve been working on a rewrite and read it back I feel like I’ve made it worse.

Which brings me to my question for the day. When editing do you rewrite the whole section or try to intermingle new sentences with a few darling sentences?

1 comment:

Jessie Oliveros said...

I can't really answer for editing because I haven't finished a whole first draft yet. But I have done a little editing as I go. And I'd have to say it depends on how horrible the first write was. I know there are sections of a book I'm writing now that are awful and will have to be completely redone. There are no darling sentences there. But then there are some paragraphs I toil over on the first write that I can't say good-bye too. Probably not much help, but I've had the same question and would like to know what others say.