√ Step Number One

I just finished rereading my novel.  According to Walter Mosley in his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, that is the first step of editing.  You reread it, see what you like and didn't like, make notes, etc.  I have to admit I don't remember what the next step is, but I'll be starting it soon.

Rereading the novel was an interesting project and I created a lot of notes.  I had been rereading the book very calmly for the last month or so, reading about 10 pages a day.  But at the end, I suddenly sped up, excited for the ending, wanting to remember how I had written it.  (That's the beauty of losing your memory for details.)

That last day I kept reading and reading and ended up reading the final 25 pages.  I didn't want to stop.  However, I noticed that there were a couple paragraphs that I skimmed.  And as I was speed reading over them, I recalled a post of Ken Levine's celebrating Elmore Leonard.

Ken wrote that one of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing was:

"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

That's a good rule to keep in mind, especially when the writer tends to skip those parts too.