Don’t be Afraid to Pour Your Heart Out First and Clean Up the Blood Before you Publish

When I started my kids book series the first version of my story was very direct and brutal. I was touching on several political issues all at once and when you are passionate about stuff like that and you are a very direct person it shows in your writing. The first version was definitely not something I would recommend reading to the 5 year old or so kids that would compose my readership.

There's only one way I can write and do it well, so from the excesses of my heart flowed the words onto the keyboard. However before could even start to illustrate it let alone publish it there was some definite tweaking needed.

It took a few rounds of reworking to make it something that people would read to kids. After pouring my heart out it was like cleaning blood off the page. However eventually I did manage to make it kid friendly without having to compromise my message.

In blog posts I have found that same thing to be true. Starting raw pouring out my heart, then tweaking my exact wording has been increasingly useful, however nothing in the way of revision as drastic as the kids books.