Yesterday I worked in the yard. I'm not exactly what you would call a gardener. Here in the Pacific Northwest with our abundant rain we have to keep vegetation from taking over, so I'm mostly a weeder.
As I was digging out poor defenseless green things yesterday, I thought about how weeding is like editing. Or editing is like weeding. Huh?
We've seen gardening analogies with writing before. We plant the seed (get the idea), we fertilize and water (write the story), and we watch (wait to hear from an editor.) But what about the editing step? How is that like weeding?
Editing is an important step to create finished pieces of writing. Some of us (like me) love editing. Others (like some of my students) don't. Which kind of writer are you?
Either way, think about what we do when we weed a garden:
- We get out our gardening tools (our paper, pencil, or computer where our story is written).
- We get rid out of the weeds that don't belong there (unnecessary words).
- We take care around the young, tender plants we encourage to grow, giving them more water and fertilizer (the necessary words).
- Finally, we look over the garden to see how it all fits together (our story).
Here's a weeding/editing exercise, and you don't even need gardening gloves!
Take a story you're working on. Get out your "gardening tools" and look for unnecessary words, phrases, or sentences. Are there words that can be deleted? (Weeded?) Are there words that should stay and be pumped up? (Given more water and fertilizer?) Can you look over your story to see how it all fits together? (Your garden?)
A weeded garden is one that can grow, and the same for your story!
