My new treadmill desk
When some people write, they dump all their words on the page until they exhaust their ideas. It’s an intense, uninterrupted process.
Not me. I write a paragraph or two (sometime just a sentence) and then I review: there’s a better word here; I need more detail there; that sentence doesn’t make sense; this one needs to convey the emotion more effectively… It’s a slow, tedious process, but in the end, the 1st draft is usually lucid and reasonably polished.
Or so I thought.
I’ve recently gone back to some writing I did over a year ago. Time and distance let me read it with new eyes. What was I thinking? This section is far too wordy. I don’t need that phrase. Less is more. RUE (Resist the urge to explain). After another round of editing, the writing is much tighter, the piece much shorter, much better.
I wonder what I’ll think of it a year from now.