Tag: editing

Horror Writing

Writing: Benefits of Editing later

Katie Marie

The benefits of editing later

All writing, be it a novel, a short story, a blog, or an email will need reviewing and editing before it is sent anywhere. Otherwise, you’re liable to come across careless or foolish. Editing is key to crafting, it might be rather dull and certainly not feel as creative as the actual drafting, but it is immeasurably important.

Editing gives our voices clarity and sharpness, it makes what we are trying to say actually make sense and lastly, it improves our content. I have found several times on an edit that what I was trying to say has become muddied in my brains rambling pathways and only with concise editing can I retrieve that tiny nugget of thought within the mess.

Think of editing as polishing an ornament or sharpening a knife, both the ornament and the knife exist on their own, but the polishing and sharpening improve them. After all, a blunt knife is both unimpressive and kind of useless and a dull lifeless ornament depreciates in value with every dust mote. It reminds me of a morning that I’d been dragged to a car boot sale by my granddad, it was cold, raining a bit and far, far too early on a Sunday morning. But I wandered the aisles and saw something, it was a pair of statues. It was immediately obvious they had gone many years without love, they were dull, filthy and battered. But I bought them, and I spent a lot of time washing, dusting and polishing them up and now they are beautiful and sit in my dining room. That is editing. Seeing the potential in something and scraping away the dirt and grime until it can shine again.

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Katie's Stories

Katie’s Stories: You Can’t Turn A Circle Into A Square

Katie Marie

Today I want to have a chat about novels and novellas.

I have talked about these two before, but today I want to talk about them a little differently, from a far more personal standpoint. One of my current WIP (work in progress) is The Man in Winter, it tells the story of Arthur, who lost his wife Molly when a break-in went wrong. After the man responsible is found and jailed everyone rebuilds their lives. But after moving into a retirement community, Art sees Molly again, and she’s got a lot to tell him about what happened that night and why justice still needs to be done. But who’s going to believe an elderly man with a diagnosis of dementia?

Originally, when this idea came to me, it came to me as a novella. I wrote the first draft over a few months and let it flow naturally, with only a loose plan of what I wanted to do. This style of writing is unlike me. I plan my stories to death before putting the first word to paper, but Art and his story walked into my head in perfect technicolour, requiring very little planning on my part. Then, as Art’s story wound to a close, the key thing I noticed about it was that it was short. Between 30k–40k words.

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