When I contemplate the amount of sheer, unadulterated crap I've written in the past couple of years, I'm simply overcome with awe to contemplate people who achieve polished perfection in the first drafts, you know?

Give me a break.

Shakespeare did re-writes. Mark Twain deleted and re-wrote. Jane Austen wrote, crossed out, re-wrote, deleted, and then re-wrote again.

You can trust me on this one. Some of those little gems you're cooing over in the privacy of your living room, some of those delicious turns of phrase that make you sigh with the pleasure of contemplating your own brilliance, some of those passages you think are going to win you the adulation of the masses--some of them stink.

If you don't own a thesaurus and a dictionary or two, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you don't love words, and the magic they can create on a page, you're a very unusual kind of writer.

The longer your story is, the better the chances are that there's stuff that should be deleted. Assuming that you know the story you want to tell, sit down and make an outline that begins at the beginning of your story, then plots the major events that take place between that and the desired outcome. Anything that isn't on that list, or isn't character development, exposition that the reader needs in order to understand what's going on, something that contributes importantly to the mood of your piece--should probably be deleted.

If there's some huge chunk of story that obviously doesn't belong in the outline, it doesn't belong in the story. (Don't sit there and twist your brain around until you come up with a half-assed reason to include it.) If you can't bear to think of continued existence without this scene, just cut it out of the story and past it into a blank file. You might get to use it later. You might not. But the good thing is that it's no longer laying sullenly in the middle of your story, confusing the readers and slowing down the plot.

Naturally I'm not advocating that you delete anything, no matter how small, that's important to your basic story. I'm just suggesting that the mere fact that you wrote something, doesn't mean it's any good. If you want to be a writer, deleting is something you have to learn to live with.

And not just big chunks. Re-write sentences to smooth out the word flow. Re-write and rearrange dialogue. Read your descriptive passages and see if you can get a better effect with different words.

If your story is one or more sentence long, there's a good change there's stuff in it you could and should delete. What you need to learn is not to stick things in a story just because you thought of them. Having this cool idea of Pendrell having problems analyzing a solution in the lab might be fun for you, but if you're writing a M/Sk and Pendrell is only important to this story for one scene, then spending a lot time with him just distracts the readers.

Contemplating (with extreme bitterness) the complete 56-page story I recently trashed, and the respective 23 pages and 16 pages of painfully written material that I yanked out of two other recent stories, I'll admit that I feel a great deal of satisfaction in sharing this ugly bit of news with you. So, don't write and tell me I don't understand how painful it is, or tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, okay?

Other than that, editing means re-reading, making sure you've chosen the right word to describe the exact emotion you're trying to convey.

It means consistency - if a character has one arm on the first page of the story, make sure you don't accidentally describe him using two arms in the sex scene later unless you've added some kind of peculiar regeneration thing in between.

It means spellchecking. Another Heartbreak Hotel moment. I've actually read a story where the author was unable to come up with one consistent spelling for their Original Character's name. It was so peculiar to read....

It means punctuation checking.

It means making sure you haven't used the word 'horrible' to describe six different things in four paragraphs.

It means seeing where your sentences are awkward and re-writing them to smooth out the prose. It means identifying those places where a character changed mood drastically and you didn't get the exposition written correctly for the reader to follow the change.

And, sometimes it mean re-writing to make a scene or a description longer, because more words are needed to convey the mood you're building. And, that's okay, too. Because the real point is to make your story better.