⭐️ Meet your Sustenance Resident Professors

Hi, I'm Brad Aaron Maudlin.

And I like talking to people, including strangers.

It's what I think we're up to when we're writing.

And it's a reason that I like being part of sustenance, because it's a chance to talk with other people about this thing that we love.

An editing hack is to think about a piece of writing you're stuck on and then summarize it out loud to somebody else.

Don't even look at it before the things that you most remember are the things that matter.

And the things that slip your mind are maybe the things to let go of.

Hi, I'm Kelly, and one of my favorite editing techniques is when I have a line that feels like meh, not exciting, I take the most expected part of that line and I tweak it.

I add a little bit of surprise, context, emotion, or depth.

For example, let's say I go to the desert every winter.

Go is an expected verb.

I change it to I drink the desert.

Instead of the lie I tell myself every winter, the lie I swig from every winter.

A small micro surprise adds so much punch and power.

Hey, I'm Rebecca Jamison and my favorite piece of writing advice comes from Elizabeth Jarrett Andrews.

Amazing book.

Living Revision, and it's called Expansion and Contraction.

And so what you're going to do is take a piece, say it's two pages long, and you're going to first compress it and cut it in half to get it down to one page.

The images, the details, the characters, whatever is going on that is most essential.

And then you're going to do another draft that takes the original piece and expands the length.

So if your original was two pages, it's now going to be four pages and you're really going to focus on expanding what is already there.

So seeing if you can deepen the in scene moments, the characters, the setting, dialogue, all of those things.

So then you'll have a four page piece and then you're going to go back to your original and see what you can incorporate from both of those other versions.