Word play.

“Excruciating,” read one email. An even worse note hit shortly thereafter. “Seriously, my neighbor who has watched me come unraveled sprayed some kind of pot thing on my tongue to help anxiety.”

After a few months of sloppy writing, my new client Sherri Hutcheson, a life coach out of Northern California, had moved on to editing. The writing had flowed easily. “I could write all night if I would stop going to the fridge for a snack,” she noted. “It’s been 30 years. What have I been missing!” The editing, however, didn’t come quite as naturally.

In my email reply, I told her to quit worrying. The two edited blog posts she’d sent over revealed a good sense of story. We just needed to work on her lead sentences and some of the language.

We started with her leads.

“You need to hook readers immediately,” I explained. “Think of them as little fish. If you haven’t baited your hook with something super appetizing, they’re going to just swim on by.”

Before long, we had lively lead sentences that worked. One post now began with active dialog. Since people respond to stories, that’s gold. The other spoke directly to her audience, highlighting an issue that most of us struggle with all the time. Bingo. That would stop me in my wake.

Next we tackled language. By pruning excess verbiage, chopping up run-on sentences, turning passive sentences on their heads to make them active and swapping out boring verbs for more interesting, effective ones, the copy sprang to life.

“This is fun!” Sherri exclaimed.

We’d come a long way from excruciating.

I agreed with Sherri’s latest assessment wholeheartedly. I love tinkering with words, helping the language gain power and elegance. The process is downright satisfying.

“From now on I want you to think of this phase as the Editing Game,” I said. “You started out with sloppy writing. That wasn’t nerve-wracking because how can you stress over writing that’s supposed to be sloppy? Now during this editing phase you’re just playing with words. So I want you to think of it as play. Word play.”

“This has become interesting rather than something where I don’t know what I’m doing,” Sherri said. “Of course, I know that Linden is there to help me take what I write to a whole other level.”

Yup, that’s what I’m here for. To dispel any writing-related fear and stay by your side as you learn how to take your craft to a whole other level on your own.

That’s how I spell editing success.