: Re: How to get over writer's block related to revising? I'm a PhD Student in the social sciences. When I do focused free-writing on a topic, my thoughts just fly out and I can easily generate

@Heady158

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I hope this is helpful. It's something that I discovered during the process of writing my first book. Like you, I love the process of initial creation, and I did that for a while, just setting aside editing for content-generation. When it came time to prepare the book proposal (non-fiction), I had to go back and do some editing to get the sample writing solid.

What I discovered was that editing is a completely separate process from writing, and if I held them in comparison, I was screwing myself. So I started to just treat editing as a fun thing to do, and instead of focusing on creating, I focused on finding rhythm and polish. I imagined reading it out loud to a group, and feeling how it flowed. Did it trip up my tongue? Was there a sentence or a paragraph that just didn't flow? Was there a section where I felt like I was losing the audience? How could I make it flow so that it would be fun for me to stand up and read it out loud?

Just as I used imagination to generate content in the first place, I used imagination differently during editing, and found that I was having just as much fun that way. Starting a session feeling what I would feel reading the early draft to a group, and then noticing how much better I felt imagining reading my polished work out loud, was all the motivation I needed. Now I actually look forward to editing just as much as I look forward to writing, sometimes even more, depending on the day.

It's all art, it's all craft, and it all comes from imagination....

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