Thursday, November 21, 2013

Guest Post Editing Part 6 Explanation

Please follow along with Guest Post Editing Part 6.

I entirety of this part's original was awkward.  Most of my rewrite was still a little awkward.  I'll try to fix that.

The first four paragraphs in the original got a boost in word count and an extra paragraph.  It was pretty bare bones, so I bulked it up to help the pacing.  My wording could have been a lot better.  How about:

"Wiggles wafted through his living room.  The fire in his fireplace was almost dead, so he tossed a piece of rugged pine into its ashy waste.  He jumped when he saw the empty taffy bowl on the mantle.

'Mom, have you eaten any of our taffy lately?' Wiggles asked.

'Not in the last few weeks.'  His mother knit her eyebrows.  'Why do you ask?'

'Just wondering.  It needs refilling, for the first time that I can remember.'  He stayed long enough for his mother to nod before retreating to his room."

The remainder of the story is a long trail of thoughts in bad form.  I summed everything up in a manner more common in prose.  My final two paragraphs are far better than my first five, for sure.

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