What You Can Learn About Editing From Speaking

Everyone has Aha! moments. Those times when someone says or does something, you see it, and the clouds part, heaven shines down, angels sing...or you go screaming into the night, “YES! This!!”
These moments can happen anytime but often seem to be when you aren’t specifically looking. You know how when you lose your car keys, tear the house apart, and they just never appear from their black hole. Then you grab your spare set (always have a spare set...not that I’d know from experience or anything) and while heading out the door, the keys are just there.

 I had a moment like this where an entire new world joined in with my previous worlds and things just clicked. This isn’t something that will click for just me, because this is about editing, knowing what words go and what words stay. Grab some popcorn for a bit while I elucidate and then show you the technology that will make this happen for you.
Last month, I gave a speech at the UCLA campus. Not too many people knew about it because this was my first foray into public speaking. I teach, so speaking in front of people isn’t a big thing. I was terrified but not of the speaking part.
It was the memorization part.
I wrote the speech, edited it multiple times, guesstimating word count to minutes, and pulled it into an app on my phone so I could speak along with it as I drove an hour to and from work.
This is where the Aha! moment came into being. And, it will probably surprise you as much as it did me. I mean, I write - a lot. Fiction and non-fiction. And I speak in front of people every day while teaching. How hard could this be, right?
*snort* Uh huh. Famous last words.

The Aha! wasn’t pleasant. It was rather horrifying.
While driving, and speaking the words I wrote, my mind started wandering.
I. Bored. Myself.
With my own words.
But...but...but *sputter*
How much more awful can I be than to bore myself with words that sounded so amazing to read?! Because, I’ll be honest, they were spot on. So what happened?
That’s when it hit me, why so many of us authors can’t catch the parts that the readers will flip through and skip.

Read the entire article in the May 2018 issue of InD'Tale magazine.

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