Boiling It Down

Okay…tapping’s done.

Syrup, the tasty finished product, is next…or is it?

Yeah, you’re right…we have to boil first, or in textual terms, edit.

I know, it’s a drag, the boring stuff, but, if you have the great raw material, lots of it, and you need an accordingly sweet, best-grade finished product, you have to edit.

Remember, before, I talked about tapping into a vein somewhere out there that exists, independently of you, some creative underground stream of sorts?

Well editing is about editing the aural…don’t I mean the oral? No, I mean the aural, the product of the ear.

If you hear what’s coming out of that stream you’ve found in the universe, unfortunately, you can’t simply ‘download’ it and utilize it. It’s a staging area, like the maple tree. You take some raw material from it, you boil it down, and then you have your finished product.

If you don’t make the effort to finish it, you just have sap.

Well, how do you connect to that stream out there? You hear it: as a result, the discovery is aural.

You edit the aural. How?

You remove things that you don’t need.

You make connections among sections as clear as you can for the reader or listener.

You add things that you need, but only things that “add value”. Don’t add anything unless you need to.

Read it out loud.

Then review the whole thing all over again, removing, connecting, adding judiciously, reading out loud.

Each time you do a “round” of editing, you’re looking for something different, word choice, consistency, verb tenses, length, etc….if you require too much from a single edit, the final sweetness won’t be as good as it could be.

I know, when you saw the word edit, you gulped, and your eyes glazed over, but that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Remember, no boiling, no syrup.

Now, go find a tree, and start tapping.

Stay tuned.