Photo courtesy of moriza

What are you working on right now: A bestseller? Your best article ever? A film script?

Maybe you’ve just finished something you’re really proud of? Or you just can’t tell whether it should get a Pulitzer or be thrown into the trash?

Here’s your chance to share and discuss with each other what you are writing about. Remember the fantastic first writing workshop we had in August? Here’s our second edition. It’s your chance to share what you are working on with other writers.

Whet our appetite with the opening paragraph of your future bestseller, give us a link to your best article, or tell us what you are writing at the moment.

Who knows, your piece might even attract the notice of a major publishing house!

Here are some guidelines:

A. Writers:

* State what aspect you’re working on. For example, you might want to say, “Here’s a link to my article Whatever. I’m currently working on eliminating superfluous words.”

B. Commenters:

* When commenting, first list everything you really like about a piece.
* Only then offer careful suggestions.
* Treat each other with respect, friendliness, caring, and honesty.
* Remember that we are all still learning.

Now it’s over to you. Take a deep breath. Then jump into the comment section and bring out your treasures!

Photo courtesy of juhansonin

This article is by WTD Chief Editor Mary Jaksch

Sometimes I write a Frankenstein piece. It looks fine until I notice that arms sprout where the legs should be - and unfortunately I forgot to attach a neck.

I don’t always notice that straight away. Why? Because when I finish writing a piece, I’m in love with it. I adore it. It’s great. No, not just great: it’s brilliant! …Until the next day…

Next day I’m shocked to see that my piece needs intense reconstruction. What happened? Overnight I took off my writer’s wings and donned the editor’s white coat and stethoscope.

Let’s say that you are ready to do the same. What now?

Those of you who can wave a First Aid certificate will know. First you do triage. Find out whether it’s a case of CPR or whether a plaster will do. Is it an oh-gawd-this-just-doesn’t-hang-together-at-all piece? Or is it a well-this-will-only-need-a-tweak piece?

In the following I’ll focus on how to get a piece to hang together. It’s about structural editing, or, how to reverse engineer a piece. Structural editing makes sure that all the bones of a piece are in the right place.

Here’s how you can operate successfully on a bungled piece:

1. Reassemble the Bones

• Write down each point of your article in its shortest form.
• Re-arrange the points into headings and subheadings.
• Add missing points.
• Cut and paste each part of the old article into the new structure.
• Add or delete sentences to make transitions.

2. Check Your Transitions

Once you’ve got your bones right, check for smooth transitions. The reader wants to be led from one idea to the next - without any jolts. I find that transitions sometimes happen in my mind but don’t land on the page. Maybe it’s perfectly clear to me how I got from cucumbers to cataracts - but my readers might need a pathway from one to the other.

3. Make a bold entry

Before you settle on an a beginning, ask yourself if it provokes sufficient curiosity in the reader. - Leo Stein

Take a look at the start of your piece. There are two questions you need to pose:

• Does it grab your readers?
• Does it introduce your theme?

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at my writing to show how editing the entry made a difference. Some months back I wrote my first guest post for Write to Done: Juicy Writing: 5 Ways to Glue Readers to the Page

The draft I sent to Leo Babauta had this beginning:

Do you want your readers to sit up and read your stuff in one gulp?

Here are five ways to glue readers to your page, whether you’re writing a blog post, an article, or a book.

1.    Sweep in; don’t creep in

Leo wrote back:

Could you add a couple paragraphs to the intro, explaining why gluing the reader to the page is a good thing and how it’s worked in your experience — I find that having a bit of background leading into such a list is helpful to readers — less abrupt.

My version number 2 was as follows:

I love reading. But not just anything. Some writers arrest me on the spot and shackle me to their page. But others fail to keep my attention: I soon start playing with the cat or surf off to other sites.

Our readers are exactly like that. Their attention is fickle and they will wander off if we don’t grab them with our words.

That’s why it’s important to seize them from the moment they hit the page and get them to read our stuff in one gulp. In the following five steps I’ll show you how to glue readers to your page, whether you’re writing a blog post, an article, or a book.

I think you’ll agree that the second version is more elegant and leads the reader into the theme.

4.  End on a high note

Check out your ending.

• Do you fizzle out?
• Do you cut off in mid-stream?
• Do you wrap up your theme?

It’s important to wrap up your piece and hand it to your readers at the end. Don’t just throw it at them and walk away!

When you look at these four points, you’ll understand that a structural edit can rescue a bad piece, as well as enhance a good one.

There are some simple things you can do to improve the structure of your writing. One is to plan your piece before you write it. (All the pieces of mine that needed reconstructive surgery were ones I wrote on a surge of inspiration - but without prior planning). The other is to analyze articles by other authors with the eyes of a structural editor.

Ask: is it a Frankenstein, or does it skip, dance, and sing?

I’d love to know whether you too have ever written a Frankenstein. Where you able to rescue it? If so, how?

If  you enjoyed this article, please visit Mary’s blog GoodlifeZen.com. where the focus is on personal growth for intelligent people.

Recently I interviewed uber-blogger Steve Pavlina for Zen Habits on the topic of personal development, habits and daily routines …

But I thought the writers and bloggers of Write To Done would be interested in a deeper look at Steve both as a blogger of an A-list personal development blog, and as a writer of a great new book: Personal Development for Smart People.

What follows is a 3-question interview I did with Steve to share with all of you, and I hope you enjoy it. Steve really went into some depth with his answers, and they’re pretty long, but fascinating nonetheless.

Continue reading »

Photo courtesy of mike warren

Note: This is a guest post written by Jonathan from the blog Illuminated Mind.

Everywhere I look, there’s another article about engaging your readers. (Kind of like a gopher popping its head up in an arcade game.)

But what does it really mean to engage your readers?

It’s not letting me edit my own posts.

It’s connecting with them in a way that’s meaningful and interesting. It’s giving them a reason to give a sh… I mean… care.

Good writing is like velcro. If you take a close-up look at velcro, you will see thousands of tiny little hooks on one end, and a mass of tangled loops on the other. When you stick the two sides together, all the little hooks get caught in the loops. What does this have to do with writing?

Your reader’s minds are the loops, your words are the hooks.

How do you hook people’s attention? The first thing you’ll hear belted out of peoples mouths is “know your audience.” I know, we’ve heard this a million times before. Quite frankly, I’m sick of hearing it myself. I think knowing your audience is important, but a little overrated.  Knowing them has a tendency to stop making a difference if you can’t give them a reason to stay, or at least bribe them with a fudgsicle.

So here’s what you can do to make them stick:

• Say the same thing twice. A lot of writers will tell you to vary your words. Don’t use the same descriptor twice. But sometimes there’s a need, and an obvious benefit, to saying the same thing twice. The benefit is getting people to pay attention and showing them that whatyou’resayingrighthere is important.
• Be wrong. Take a contrarian point of view. Reject the popular opinion. But don’t be wrong just for the sake of being wrong. Be “wrong” because you know that being wrong is really right.
• Be true. It’s easy to get caught up in writing things for the sake of popularity. We want 10,000 people to read our article. Then we reach 10,000 and we want 50,000. We start to shape our writing based on popularity and then what happens? People lose interest. Remember that people started to read your writing because you are passionate about it. Sometimes you need to give yourself a reality check, especially before you sell out.
• Show them you care. Tell them your story. Give them reasons why their problem is the same problem you’ve dealt with before. Let them know that you’ve been there. You haven’t just read the map, you’ve traversed the terrain.
• Make it real. Have you ever noticed that most blogs you frequent, most ideas you’ve remembered, and most of the things you care about, have a story related to them? Find a way to tell a story about the idea you’re trying to convey. If you don’t have a story of your own, borrow one from someone else.
• Tell them to pay attention. Sometimes being direct is the best way to get people to pay attention. Sometimes you just have to tell people that this-is-important.
• Be obvious. Don’t make them search for the meaning. Make them think, and they’ll love you. Make them confused and they’ll want their money back. It’s not a bad thing to make your readers curious, but at some point you have to satisfy that curiosity.
• Alarm them. Shock and amaze your readers with a dazzling story of immense proportions. Surprise them with a twist they never could have seen coming. Swerve, u-turn, hover, and flip. But make it relevant. Special effects can be stunning, but are nothing without good content to back it up.

See how many of these hooks you can use in your writing to engage your readers. The more of these you can weave into your words, the more you’ll make them stick (and keep them coming back for more).

PS: I found this really cool site called Letter Whiz the other day. It has a bunch of free templates for letters, as well as a great resource for finding quotes to use in your articles.

This post was written by Jonathan Mead from the Illuminated Mind. For more sticky ideas, follow him on twitter.

Photo courtesy of aussiegall

This is a guest post by Jesse Hines, a freelance writer who writes the blog Robust Writing.

Word counts.

Most writers have to deal with them. Whether we’re writing a paper for a high school or college class or submitting an article to a magazine or newspaper, chances are good we’ve been told how many words (give or take a reasonable amount) the paper or article should be.

Word counts are tough to deal with sometimes. Maybe the word count is small (100 words) or large (5000 words). Either way, word counts can haunt us if we let them.

Is This You?

Some writers have serious difficulty writing enough quality content to reach their word count. They just don’t seem to be able to come up with much to write about for that topic. For them, just about any word count is too big.

Or Maybe This is You?

Other writers, like me, constantly exceed their word counts; for us, the problem is having too much to say, and wanting to say it all.

To the writers who have trouble meeting their word counts, all I can really say is to read more widely, think more critically, do more research on your topic, and throw every bit of information on your topic into your assignment and work backwards–go past your word count and then edit it back down to the right number.

To the writers who are always going well past their word counts, and need some help determining how to cut their copy down to the level required and still retain the piece’s quality, I’ve got some editing tricks to share.

Editing Tricks for Cutting Your Word Count

I often write articles that have a word count roughly between 500 and 600 words. It’s not unusual for me to finish my first draft well over 600 words and even past 700 words.

I often find myself having to eliminate somewhere near 100 words. Through a regular necessity to rigorously edit myself, I’ve naturally found myself implementing the following editing methods. If you put these principles into action, you can often get down to your word count while retaining the critical substance of your piece.

Plus, by having to make your copy more concise, you can end up with crisper, quicker, smoother, and more readable content.

Eliminate Articles, Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Pronouns, and Other Descriptors When Possible

Often, I strike out as many uses of a, an, the, that, which, and similar words as I possibly can. Sometimes these articles are necessary to smooth out the prose or to make something specifically clear.

However, often, they’re just filler and can be safely eliminated if their presence isn’t necessary for clarification. You’d be surprised how many of these words you use–just getting rid of them can significantly bring down your word count. Look at the following example:

With articles

He won second place for the best tasting pie, as well as third place for the most original ingredients.

Without articles

He won second place for best tasting pie, as well as third place for most original ingredients.

The revised version, by cutting out two non-essential uses of the word the, says the same thing smoother, and with two fewer words.

As well, the adverbs and adjectives which you use can add incredible color to your writing, but they can also very often end up expanding your word count without adding necessary or beneficial depth.

If you write, “His incredibly intense passion motivated him to work hard,” you can eliminate some adjectives and reduce the number of words, while keeping your meaning.

Eliminate incredibly and intense, as the word passion means, “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling,” according to Dictionary.com, and thus already expresses your meaning. The two adjectives don’t add much description to the meaning and can be safely cut.

Eliminate Redundant Words and Passages

If you find a phrase like, “The armed gunman,” cut armed, as it’s obvious that the gunman was armed with a gun.

If you find a phrase like, “Past history shows that…,” cut past, as anything that is history is in the past.

Cutting these singular words can add up.

If you find that you’ve written a passage later in your piece that seems really similar to one you wrote near the beginning–look at it closely. It’s possible you’ve essentially repeated yourself. Thus, you can eliminate one of the passages or combine them into one, smaller passage.

That action can cut out bunches of words.

Eliminate Anything that Doesn’t Specifically Relate to Your Main Point

If you’re forced with cutting your word count down by a lot, scour your piece for any passages that don’t absolutely or necessarily relate to your main argument or subject.

You may have written some stuff about how the successful coffee shop’s owner is from such and such and he enjoys such and such in his free time, but if the piece is about the shop’s success itself, the owner’s hometown and hobbies can be left out if you need to use fewer words.

Use Contractions

This trick is sneaky, but simple. It’s also great for keeping your meaning exact and cutting your word count.

Use don’t instead of do not, haven’t instead of have not, won’t instead of will not, and they’ve instead of they have, and so on.

Using one word instead of two whenever possible can drop that word count quickly.

An Example

Let’s take a sentence I used earlier in this post and edit it down significantly by using some of the above tricks.

Original version (34 words)

As well, the adverbs and adjectives which you use can add incredible color to your writing, but they can also very often end up expanding your word count without adding necessary or beneficial depth.

New version (16 words)

Adverbs and adjectives give color to writing, but can also expand word counts without adding depth.

I didn’t even use all of the tricks, but I still cut that sentence in half, paring down my overall word count.

A Clarification

Don’t misunderstand me–I’m not saying that eliminating descriptors and doing away with interesting bits of information not strictly related to your thesis is the way you should always write.

What I’m saying is that if you find yourself having to drastically cut down your word count, then the aforementioned editing tricks can help you do just that, while leaving the substance of your piece intact.

What about you?

What editing methods do you use when you have to bring that word count down?

About the Author: Jesse Hines is a freelance writer. You can read more from him at his blog, Robust Writing.

WritetoDone is a Proud Winner of the Top 10 Blogs For Writers Award!

We were voted the #4 writers blog. In the description it says: ‘This blog delivers a steady stream of excellent articles for all writers’.

Leo and Mary would like to thank all of you who voted for WTD!