Leaving My Bubble

This February I decided to leave my introverted bubble and attend two different writer’s groups that meet locally. One of the groups does a monthly writing prompt and asks members to prepare their prompt to share before the meeting. I had quite a time editing my writing prompt.

I don’t consider myself to be a writer. I love to read, to consume text. I love to learn. I have decided I will continue to meet with these groups monthly to continue to learn alongside writers. If I am going to continue to help authors grow in their craft and better reach their readers, then I can continue to gain a better understanding of writing myself.

Below you will find a video I took as I did some self-editing on my response to the February prompt, “Cupid loses his magical arrow.” Below the video you will find my written summary of the experience.

Video: Self-Editing My Writing Prompt

A Humbling Experience

Today I want to share with you a little bit about my recent, and very humbling, experience with a writing prompt. Putting myself in an author’s shoes for this prompt was very difficult for me, but I really enjoyed it. 

A local writers group had their February prompt as “Cupid loses his magical arrow.” The writing had to be 100 words or less. As you can see in my word count, disregarding my title, I am at 126 words. So I need to do a little bit of some self-editing. We’re going to see what we’ve got and how we can edit this down to fit 100 words. 

First, Turn On Track Changes

First, I want to make sure that in Microsoft Word I’ve got my Review tab open and we’re going to turn on Track Changes. One thing that really stood out to me was the sentence down here. “The fate of those two is out of my hands now. As they go their separate ways, leaving via opposite ends of the bridge.” I feel like it’s pretty wordy. If they’re going their separate ways, then we can imagine them leaving in some form or fashion. I believe we can leave out this “leaving via opposite ends of the bridge.”  Now we are at 119 words.

Next, Trim

“So it was magic. How do you lose magic?” This is repetitive. Let’s take this down to just the second sentence. 

“I guess when it’s in the form of an arrow and gets shot around via a bow, it’s a little easier to lose track of.” Well, “get shot around via a bow” should be a given when discussing arrows. So let’s let that phrase go. 

We are still taking a look at what things we can trim. I really do like this little “dang arrow” phrase. It puts you into Cupid’s mindset, but it’s not necessary. I’m just going to highlight it for now as something we can drop if needed. 

“I’ve got the perfect couple in my sight now, holding hands and walking across the bridge.” This part is excellent because it shows the setting and describes what this “perfect couple” looks like. They’re holding hands, they’re walking across the bridge together, but we’ve got a lot of words to trim down. So let’s let this descriptive phrase go. Now we are at 105 words.

 “Now would be a perfect time to seal their love.” I’m noticing that I have the word “perfect” here and the word “perfect” in the previous sentence “perfect couple”. Let’s go ahead and say “now would be the time to seal their love”. 

“Now would be the time to seal their love, if that dang arrow was anywhere nearby.” Let’s trim the word “anywhere” and leave it at “if the arrow was nearby”.  “The fate of those two is out of my hands now as they go their separate ways. How could I be so forgetful? If only there was a carrier or … oh my quiver,  ugh” again the word “ugh” is trying to put you in Cupid’s frame of mind, but we are at 101 words and I think we can let it go. 

Let’s double check, 100 words exactly. Excellent! It is so hard to write in such a concise and thoughtful way. 

Finally, Reread!

Before I call it done, I want to make sure that this piece is still holding true to how I wanted it to come through for my readers. What was my message in this? I really wanted my reader to see that Cupid is this forgetful, silly guy. He sees this couple right in front of him, but he can’t find the arrow because he has completely forgotten that he has a quiver on his back where that arrow could be placed, or maybe he’s even got more of them back there. So let’s read it through one more time and just make sure that comes through.

I think it’s still coming across that he’s this forgetful guy, he’s kind of silly. In reading it through once more I noticed two words “now” very close to one another. I’d like to replace one, “I’ve got the perfect couple in my sight. Now would be the time to seal them…” I think that works great.

I believe we trimmed this piece down to fit our directions. You can see that in our markup, we’ve trimmed out pieces that were really just extra words. We were still able to keep the message we were going for, and these extra pieces just weren’t necessary to our story. It would certainly be more fun to add them in and expand on our setting, add more of Cupid’s frame of mind. Maybe in the future we come back to this and flesh it out to become a short story instead. 

I certainly feel very humbled by this experience. Trying to think of what to write based on this prompt took a lot longer than I care to admit to. It was hard, and then the self-doubt hit me. The whole time writing it was difficult for me, but I am glad I did it. I will continue to push myself to learn more. And it was certainly really fun to edit it afterwards. 

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I hope that you enjoyed learning alongside me, and I hope that you’ll check out my blog and website to learn more about editing services and tips for writers.