[stylist] How could I improve this story?

[Barbara Hammel]

Thanks, Chris.  And yes, I am telling the truth.  I did not like "wasting" 
Braille paper so I would agonize over something until it sounded like I 
wanted it to and only then would I write it down.  Of course, I only got 
average grades because of it, I'm sure.

Barbara


Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. -- Carl Sandburg
-----Original Message----- 
From: Chris Kuell
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 7:36 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: Re: [stylist] How could I improve this story?

Barbara,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's hard for me to believe you
did your best work if you never revised. I'm sure you did good work, but
everything is improved with a little polish.

Revising your own work is often much harder than revising someone else's
work, which is why I've tried to encourage people on this list to read
critically and comment on peoples writing. It can help the writer, and it
helps the critiquer to develop editing/revising skills. If you are really
stuck in the revising process, perhaps you should try to 'fix' a piece of
someone else's writing. It will help put you into the mindset of reading
carefully and thinking--how can I make this better?

As for your book, I think you could try either strategy--either a complete
re-write, or massive revision. It's hard to say what will work best, as
everyone is different. If it were me, I think I'd try the complete rewrite
approach. I say this because the biggest problem I saw with your book was
plausibility. If it were tense changes or bad dialogue, those are easy to
fix. But plausibility requires new scenes, large scale changes, which I
think would be easier by starting from scratch.

Try it and see what happens.

chris




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