Book editor and freelance writer Jen Weiss passes some tips along.
Once you’ve finished writing, try putting it away for a while. A day, a week?however long it’ll take you to nearly forget about it. Most writers I know agree that this is the only way they’re able to hack into their writing effectively. This sort of skill is especially handy when you need to somehow hack your 5,000-word masterpiece down to the 2,500 words you’ve been assigned. You’ll have to be able to look at your own writing?your baby?objectively to do it. Revise those metaphors you thought were beautiful when you wrote them but don’t mean a darned thing, lose paragraphs that you felt at the time were essential to your line of reasoning but aren’t in the least. I can’t possibly lose chunks of my writing immediately after finishing; I’m too close to it. If I thought anything I wrote wasn’t important, why did I write it? But once I’ve put it away for a while, and perhaps have started writing something else, it’s much easier to get in there.
I can see the call to the city desk: “Sorry, that lead story on the shuttle crash will have to wait till next week… I need time to self-edit.”
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