on The Write Life:

Writers rarely spit out their best copy on the first draft. If you meet a writer who claims to have the secret for doing so, please let the rest of us know!

First drafts — and second drafts and sometimes thirds — exist to hash your ideas out on paper. After you’ve revised your book, story, blog post or article until you can revise no more, you just hand it off to your editor to clean up, right?

Well, that’d be ideal. But most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring an expensive editor to review our personal blog post It might even be hard to spend the money for a book editor. And since procrastination is the writer’s best friend, you might not even have time to even ask a fellow writer pal take a quick peek for errors.

And so, in some cases, it falls to you to be your own editor.

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