One of the hardest parts of writing a story that doesn’t get talk about often enough is getting to the final draft. What separates the 5th, 6th, 18th draft from the final one?
There’s no one single answer to that question, but a big part of it comes down to scalpel-level editing.
During the last stream, viewer iwritegooder submitted their story to be revised by the Story Surgeon. Their story was a beautiful snapshot of an adult son spending the last moments of his dying father’s life with him in the hospital.
It was clear that iwritegooder had already put a lot of work into their story, but it was missing something: it needed to have a lot of fat trimmed off.
We went over a lot during this video, showing techniques for how you can take the scalpel to your own story. By the end of the operation, we cut down the story’s length by 20 percent! And it’s even tighter and more powerful for it.
You can see the process we went through here,
and see the revised story we edited together!
After that, chat voted that we write this prompt: “A cinema is haunted by the ghost of a philosopher. He is extremely apologetic.”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-11:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel, or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Pakutaso