You’ve just finished a first draft of your novel. It may have taken you a few months or a few years. But what’s the next step? How do you approach revising a novel when it feels so huge?

​As a professional editor, I deal with hundreds of clients a year who are eager to submit their books to agents and publishers. The process I use for editing a book involves three steps. Not all books need all of these steps, but knowing the difference between them can help you edit your own work.

Read the Article at Feedium . . .

White-tendriled weed
in bloom, cotton shrouds
a hundred of your hearts
each one a white world
sweet, unruly, unknowable...

Read the full poem at The Junction . . .

Poets who have been writing for several years end up with lots of unfinished drafts and notes. As a freelance editor, I often work with clients who have tons of old drafts and no clue how to process them. For myself, I often write 100+ poems in a year, resulting in a massive amount of poem clutter.

After all, you don’t want to abandon those poems that are older, because they feel like your babies. But it is necessary to sort through them, to choose poems for publication or to just decide how to categorize them. As Paul Valery said, “No poem is ever ended, every poem is merely abandoned.” Poems that don’t work now might work later. Poems that aren’t published in a journal or magazine might make it into the later draft of a book.

As I was thinking about this process, I wished there was a good method for sorting through old drafts. Then I remembered one of my favorite Netflix shows and a woman named Marie Kondo.

Read the full article here . . .