Hearing honest feedback on your writing can be tough, particularly if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. If you find it hard to hear criticism, remember that the feedback is on your work, not you. Separate yourself from your writing

If your text isn’t working, your first thought may be that it lacks something. So you try to add in what’s missing. But sometimes, you can actually improve your text more by cutting it down.

Ideally, you should expect to spend just as long revising your draft as writing it – if not longer.

The ugly first draft. This is when you ‘write through the bad to reach the good’, as we saw in the previous chapter. The chainsaw edit. Move whole sections and paragraphs around until your draft takes shape. The surgical-tool edit. This is about fine-tuning at the level of individual words and sentences (chapters 8 and 9). Read it out loud. Listen

Editing is different from writing in two important ways. First, you stop trying to generate new material and start improving what you already have. Second, you stop thinking like a writer and aim to start thinking like a reader.

Maybe you think your draft is pretty good to begin with. Well, believe me: it can always be better.

Rewriting is where you go back over your draft, once or several times, to see if you can express the ideas more clearly than you did before.

what we call ‘writing’ is actually quite a short and unimportant part of the whole process. It’s really just a bridge to get you from thinking, where your ideas are first formed, to editing, where you find the best way to express them.

You might expect things to start simple, then get more complex later on. But when you’re writing, it’s usually the other way round. Your writing starts out messy and complicated, and you work hard to simplify it. Your first draft is a mess of contradictions, repetition and murky thinking, which you painstakingly disentangle to make your message