The other day a friend of mine asked me to edit her manuscript. I'm happy to help her. In fact, I find this request a wonderful coincidence as I needed a writing example for this blog.
My first challenge is keeping the story in her writing style, or in other words, her originality. I like to write in a forward, fast pace. Her sentences are longer and her way of speech is slower. This is one of her paragraphs.
"We are living and thriving in ways that are unprecedented for us. We have learned real and true love as a result of overcoming this horrible malady of our time. It has been well defined for us that pornography is a terrible substitute for authentic love. So many tender mercies along the way have revealed for us the truths needed to set us free.One of which was removing the label of addiction and addict. A time came in our lives when we had invested years of work into recovery and understanding was given to us that the struggle in our lives and the involvement with pornography that was once an addiction now fell under the category of a behavior compulsion. This reality repealed layers of shame for my husband and helped him feel vindicated that the effort he had put in was making a difference. It removed layers of fear for me. What I knew then as a pornography addiction had punctured my very soul. It also changed and redefined us. Our love has become so much more whole.”
Her biggest obsticles are wordiness and writing in a passive voice. I made big cuts, reorganized paragraphs, and put it back together into a storyline. After editing, I created this paragraph,
"We have discovered real and true love as a result of overcoming this horrible burden. Pornography is a terrible substitute for authentic love. Many years of work revealed to us pornography falls under the category of behavior compulsion. This reality removed layers of shame for my husband and helped him feel vindicated that the effort he put in made a difference. It removed layers of fear for me."
I'd like to say that she loved my editing. But to be honest, I haven't heard a word.
I think that it is so easy to get carried away with being too wordy. Sometimes it makes us feel our work is more fancy or higher caliber. But this class is teaching us how crucial is can be for us to make everything just a little bit more simple.
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