Polishing your Prose: The Difficult Second Draft - ReedsyLive

[@Travis7060312]

First draft is for me. Seconds draft is for readers. Third is for editors and polishing. I like that.

[@kit888]

1. Get some distance from the first draft. 2. Read your book out loud. 3. Literally change the way you look at the draft - change the font, read on a different device. 4. Book Architecture by Stuart Horwitz. Take stock of your threads and themes. Conflict, character arcs, foreshadowing. Are your conflicts artificial? What is the one thing your book is about? Andrew Stanton - make the reader care. 5. Get into the details. Search and delete "very". Don't use fancy punctuation like semicolons, in dialogue. Use "said" as your main dialog tag or no tags at all. Track down your writing tics, overused words. Remove unnecessary descriptions, condense the writing. Balance showing versus telling. Emma Darwin - High Definition writing, remove needless filtering of descriptions through a character's viewpoint. Front-load the action. Use adjectives sparingly. Vary the length of sentences. Remove adverbs. Stephen King's "On Writing". Less is more.

[@beverleykane8164]

Thank you! I will believe anything I hear in that cultured British accent. Seriously, this was helpful--even for the self-health book I'm writing.

[@johngarland2336]

Super useful, thank you.

[@russelladams9147]

Thank you for your time.

[@jpch8814]

I'm in the middle of my second raft and Andrew hit the mark. This video was very (:P) informative.

[@AJShiningThreads]

Moral of the story... Writing is difficult @

[@williamturns341]

Amen!!!!

[@themisanthropechannel8052]

I can't find a video that actually tackles the process of writing good prose. How do you come up with poetic verse that sounds *good* ? I have depression, my brain doesn't get inspired anymore.

[@demiserofd]

For me, I can only write well when I'm not fixated on my writing. It has to be incidental. When I'm sitting in my room all day staring at a screen, nothing is going to come out. When I'm with my family? Eating together? Exercising together, watching TV together? That breeds the environment and inspiration for good and prolific writing. Inspiration is like a plant. You can't lock it up in a room and expect it to grow. You need to keep it watered, give it light, and give it time, and it will grow. Of course, once you do that you still need to sit down and write, but doing so becomes exponentially easier.

[@Pfsif]

Good stuff!