{"id":553,"date":"2004-02-12T09:26:27","date_gmt":"2004-02-12T09:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=553"},"modified":"2004-02-12T09:26:27","modified_gmt":"2004-02-12T09:26:27","slug":"on-writers-being-editors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/02\/on-writers-being-editors\/","title":{"rendered":"On writers being editors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Book editor and freelance writer Jen Weiss <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mediabistro.com\/articles\/cache\/a1178.asp\">passes some tips<\/a> along.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Once you&#8217;ve finished writing, try putting it away for a while. A day, a week?however long it&#8217;ll take you to nearly forget about it. Most writers I know agree that this is the only way they&#8217;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&#8217;ve been assigned. You&#8217;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&#8217;t mean a darned thing, lose paragraphs that you felt at the time were essential to your line of reasoning but aren&#8217;t in the least. I can&#8217;t possibly lose chunks of my writing immediately after finishing; I&#8217;m too close to it. If I thought anything I wrote wasn&#8217;t important, why did I write it? But once I&#8217;ve put it away for a while, and perhaps have started writing something else, it&#8217;s much easier to get in there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I can see the call to the city desk: &#8220;Sorry, that lead story on the shuttle crash will have to wait till next week&#8230; I need time to self-edit.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book editor and freelance writer Jen Weiss passes some tips along. Once you&#8217;ve finished writing, try putting it away for a while. A day, a week?however long it&#8217;ll take you to nearly forget about it. Most writers I know agree&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/02\/on-writers-being-editors\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}