As a writer who’s written a lot, do you still struggle with some aspects of writing, like your punctuation still sucks or something?
My biggest weakness as a writer is repeating words and phrases, which is a very common thing for writers to have. There are people like Pat Rothfuss who don’t have this problem. Because they slave over every sentence. For years. [audience laughs] You know I love him. The way I deal with it is to highlight the ones I struggle with a lot, and have my assistant look for them. Then do a search and replace in Microsoft Word for the word but with brackets around it, so it leaves the same word it just brackets it so I can decide, do I really want that word, or did I just use it because that’s what I always use. The other big thing as a writer is I still don’t like revision. I want to be writing a new story, not revising an old one. Fortunately, this is a battle revision won like twenty years ago. More like fifteen. But I’ve gotten used to how I have to do it. When is the book done, and the number of drafts it requires. So I do it, even though, you know…
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