Every writer knows the moment a draft goes cold. The cursor blinks. The previous session’s work sits on the screen, sealed off and complete, and the next sentence is nowhere you can reach it.
Most of us respond the same way. We open the document and begin editing in place, the cursor moving through what we have already written, adjusting a word here, a clause there, the whole draft slowly improving. Or so it seems.
What I discovered during the writing of my novel and novella is that editing in place keeps you inside the draft’s original logic. You are seeing what you meant to say, not what you said.
This week on Ramos On Craft, I write about The Kindling Draft, the practice that returned me to the work from the inside when nothing else would, and why it teaches you something about your own prose that any amount of editing in place never will.
The full article is waiting for you at Ramos On Craft on Substack.
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