“As laborious as this approach might seem – retyping the same sentence or paragraph ten, fifteen times – it’s the most organic way I know to edit. If I type a sentence the same way ten times, that is, I must see something in it. When I know enough about the story – the voice is clear to me, the characters fully-realized, the plot pieces in place, the language as dynamic as I can make it – I retype the whole story again once or twice. I usually don’t make any ‘local’ edits – polishing sentences, rearranging paragraphs, etcetera – until the last two or three drafts.”
“…I’d been thinking about this story – or the prospect of it – for a few months before I started it, but I remember feeling particularly at sea when I began; I didn’t have a first line or premise to work from, and none of the prompts that I’d planned churned up anything of use. Once I began writing, though, this story took about a month – writing every day, for at least two or three hours – to complete.”
Read Trout Heart in Issue 6
Below: the writer’s writing space
