Guess what? I haven’t looked at my NaNo 2010 effort since  I finished the required 50,000 words to qualify as having completed NaNo successfully. I find that editing and polishing your writing take much more time and effort than writing the first draft. I am sure this must be your experience too. As I have learnt over the short time, I have started writing in earnest ” Write In A Rush, Edit At Leisure”.

Writing in a rush includes writing when you are in full flow. There could be very obvious mistakes that you know occur even as your fingers fly on the keyboard. Let them pass. Don’t go back to correct anything at this stage. Now our focus should be in getting the words out, hooking up the plot and building the characters, using dialogues as linkers, to explain and to provide context. I am afraid you can’t do this at leisure. At least, I can’t.

However, you can’t edit in a rush. This calls for concentrated effort to improve your sentences, make sure there are no obvious blunders, no typos or grammatical mistakes. All this requires, in my experience, huge amounts of time and effort. You are well advised to edit at leisure. If you edit and seek to improve your writing in a rush, it is inevitable that mistakes will be overlooked or worse still, you may make new mistakes.

This method had certainly worked for me. Your thoughts?