You know the feeling of writing a story and enjoying every moment of it, believing that writing was what you were born to do and you believe you’re really good at it? 

Well, a professional edit of your first draft will very quickly deflate that growing head. 

You Are My Sunshine is the first story I’ve written. And yes, it happened to sound a lot better in my head. 

 My first editor made helpful suggestions, pointed out plot holes, and asked important questions about my characters. 

She taught me how to describe a setting in a manner that didn’t sound like an interior decorator’s catalog. 

She taught me how to use backstory in a manner that advances the plot or has some relevance to the story or the development of the character. 

She was too kind to say that my dialogue stank but my husband had no filter in letting me know that it didn’t sound natural.

I even ignored using colorful dialogue tags for want of just getting the story out.

I had a real problem sticking to tenses too. I just wrote whatever sounded natural in my mind and went with it only to find out that every editor and beta reader I sent my completed second draft to was having nightmares. 

They all made sure to point out that I moved between tenses and I needed to choose one and stick with it. Easy for them to say. 

Eventually, I decided to stick with the present tense and I had to edit my entire second draft. 

Google has been my best friend, once again, when it came to learning how to write body language, synonyms for ‘says’ and ‘asks’, and different ways to describe the color brown. Who knew there are 50 shades of brown, not only grey?