Sydney Strand

Edna from The Incredibles: LUCK FAVORS THE PREPARED A writer friend, Katrina, has asked me what to do when it comes to revising a book. I'm like "Hey, I'll send you my checklist!" Oh no. I thought I had saved my revision list, and I probably have, but it's under the name of Fuzzy Yellow Unicorn and buried 10,000 deep on my hard drive. Argh. Luckily, I have it printed out and inserted in beautiful plastic sleeves in my Writing Notebook (the cover features dear Edna, above). So that means: transcription! So because of that, this will be a multiple-part series. And it's dedicated to Katrina. (Writer friend, not hurricane.) Background About What This Part Does You need to see if you're writing the story you intended to write. After many years of revising stories, I've found that if I take the time to do this step, you will waste less time in the more active revisions to follow. This section serves the following purpose: Slowing down ...

First of all, a quick confession: I have moved from seven to eight drafts. Yep, to make it as good as I can humanly make it (that means, yes, there are still mistakes, just like there were still mistakes in my NY-published books!), I must go over a story eight times, dissecting it like a frog in Biology class. * * * So last week, I spent time flying and visiting. Specifically, Utah and Las Vegas. Chicago on Plane #1 Nevada/Utah Border on Shuttle #1 The Garden Center in Utah: at least someone's having a spring! Trying on hats while dad looked for bubbler parts But whenever I go to Utah (or Florida or Maine or Massachusetts or Washington DC), I bring work. This time, the work was me FINALLY getting through Draft #4 (the longest, hardest draft in the writing process). Beating Draft 4 into Submission Draft 4 is an interesting draft. Why? 1) I interview the story with my six-page, single-spaced list of questions I've compiled from 10-20 wri...