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204 14 Good Writing - Rewriting UNLESS YOU'RE A CLOSET SHAKESPEARE, YOUR WORDS will never fall onto the paper just right on your first try. There are too many words in the language, too many shades of meaning, too many opportunities to be just a bit more precise or effective. Your first try should never be shipped off to a waiting editor. Would-be writers who make that mistake become has-beens before they ever break into the field. Magazine writing is in no way like writing for a large newspaper, where a rewrite department is part ofthe staff. This field demands a honed and polished finished product. Ofcourse, any good editor can edit drivel into finished prose. But he won't-that's not his job. If you want to make it as a magazine writer, you must learn to be your own editor. We've been in this business for a long time, with hundreds of published magazine articles, twenty-two books, and two decades of writing, editing and publishing a monthly trade newsletter. Yet we still go through a minimum of two heavy edits on everything we write. In our early days, we needed four or five drafts to get an article right. We don't expect we'll ever be able to turn in unrevised manuscripts that give us the pride of ownership that makes all of writing's headaches worthwhile. We now prefer to make our first run at editing on the computer and our last with a pen, but we still habitually slog through several drafts. If you organize your article tightly before you begin, and cover almost every salient point on the first run-through, maybe you'll be able to carefully write your first draft, cut and paste, and make final corrections all on the computer . On the other hand, you might be one of those writers whose first drafts are little more than loosely organized scraps ofthought. In that case, you'll probably need a second run-through to take you down the plotted channel, a third go-round on the computer, and then a meticulous pen editing of bumps and dips before you're ready to call your work finished. If you're a true writer, we'll wager that even after you print out your final draft you'll tinker here and there before it's mailed or e-mailed. A few beginners put offsubmission by polishing past the point of shine. They rub away at each and every word and end by wearing off the spontaneous flow of thought that is the real object ofwriting. It's important to keep in mind that every word need not be the best possible word. But ifyou are to successfully conquer the challenge of writing for magazines, you must develop the skill of 205 Good Writing = Rewriting recognizing good writing in other articles and in your own. More important, you must develop the discipline required to turn in an article that represents your best current writing. Perhaps ifwe share with you our thoughts as we edited a manuscript's first draft, you can start studying your own manuscripts like an editor. Good Writing = Good Editing Illustration 14.1, taken from our own files, is a page of a brief article we wrote for a regional magazine. It's the first ofa series of restaurant reviews, and had to establish our credentials and objectivity. The first draft, reproduced here, is not bad-but it's not good enough. In Illustration 14.2, you can see how we edited the rough draft. The editing was slow and painstaking; usually editing takes us more time than the rough draft we write at full speed to get our ideas down on paper. When we felt the manuscript was sufficiently ready (Ill. 14.2), we went through again, making even more little improvements (Ill. 14.3). We printed that out, penned in a few polishing touches and, certain now that the article said what we wanted it to, we mailed it off. Let's look first at the purpose for each paragraph in our example. Paragraph 1: The primary purpose is to provide a lead. Since this is a local magazine , we've chosen to tease readers into wanting to know how cosmopolitan big-timers rate their restaurants. A secondary purpose is to establish our credentials as big-timers. It fits easily into our lead, and we get it done in the very first sentence. A...

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