Wednesday, March 4, 2020

The After Story Curbside Debrief

In today's post, I describe a short, but simple exercise to help you edit for the desired impact your story can have on your audience.

In my current profession, we have a self-assessment procedure that we do walking out of every retailer store visit. During this "Curbside Debrief, " we ask ourselves these 5 questions after walking out of the most recent store:

  1. What did I do well and how would I know?
  2. What didn't I do well?
  3. What will I always do?
  4. What will I never do again?
  5. Did I leave the store better than I found it?
This is a great self-assessment that can be morphed into many different applications. I would postulate that you could apply this to either your rough draft, finished article, manuscript, or short story. Once you complete that process, go back and then write in another color ink what you wish it would have said (assuming you wished it had said something different). The differences can help you tune in on where you might want to do some edits.

Just a short and simple exercise that can have a much larger impact on your writing.

Did you leave your audience better than you "found" them? :)

1 comment:

  1. Short and sweet, and all a writer has to do is change one letter within all five questions: Did you leave the storY better than you found it? ;)

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