I wrote a post a few months ago about my self-editing process. I tend to make changes and edits as I write, which results in a highly polished, but slow to produce, first draft. I’ve noticed lately, however, that my writing has been progressing even slower (for multiple reasons), but one important reason is that I’ve gotten a bit bogged down in the editing and polishing as I’m writing.

I am also a very verbose writer. My current WIP (and my favorite genre) is epic fantasy, which by definition is long—but I really love words and descriptions, and sometimes I just have too many words in my manuscript. One of the things that I do when I’m self-editing as I write is look for places where I can tighten up a sentence or a paragraph. That’s also one of the biggest things I ask my editor to help with—tightening up and trimming down.

I know that many writers have the opposite problem—after their first draft, they have to go back through and add descriptions, tags, modifiers, explanations. This blog post is not for you (sorry!). This is for the folks like me who put in way too much in the way of descriptions, tags, modifiers, and explanations.