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“I cross out most of what I write.”
Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Many children expect to write a successful story in one sitting. After all, haven’t we taught you to do this? To plan, write and check a story in half-an-hour?
Pah! What a ridiculous idea! No novelist would ever do that!
When writing a book, some authors rewrite a page twenty or thirty times, thinking hard about every sentence.
No, no, no! Redrafting is editing, thinking about and rewriting every sentence of your story! The trick is to become self-critical. Don’t wait for your teacher to criticize your writing – and don’t rest until your story is perfect.
Most stories the Grumpy Examiner reads suffer from the same three flaws:
- The writer hasn’t made him care about the characters.
- There isn’t enough description
- The writer has used too many sentences of the same length.
Here are six ways to improve your stories when redrafting.
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Add more shown feelings. You can never have too many feelings in your stories. |
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Include some ‘questions about the character’. |
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Cut the chat. Many stories have too much dialogue, and not enough description. Try cutting some of the speech in your story, and add extra description. |
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Use all of our descriptive techniques when ‘setting the scene’ at the beginning of the story. |
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If you’re redrafting in class or at home, you’ll need your dictionary and thesaurus to hand. Don’t wait for your teacher to point out ‘you’ve spelt that word wrong’ or ‘this is a boring adjective’. |
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Make sure you’ve included at least one of the following:
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(c) Nick Hitchen 2007 |
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Last updated on
August 13, 2007
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