I’ve been trying to write in years (in greek, so forgive any errors in english, it is not my native language) and never getting anything finished because I always made the mistake of re-re-revising every single page I wrote.

In fifteen years of trying, I only finished 3 short stories because of this constant re-re-revising. Practically I was getting tired of the story before having the chance of finishing it! (Ok, I was doing other things too in the meantime like getting a university degree, but I’m convinced I could have finished more than three short stories!)

Then a year ago I took the decision of at least finishing what I call the ‘first writing’ before making ANY revisions at all. ‘First writing’ is simply putting ideas and scenes in the .doc file till I reach the end of the story. Then I do the ’second writing’ where I try to enrich the text with more details to make characters, scenes and the world more vivid. ‘Third writing’ is to iron out any discrepancies. Then I check spelling, I print, read from the paper (this is the really exciting part) make final corrections, reformat page (I like to write in pages with 550+ words per page, while most books have a maximum of 350-400), print again and the start another story.

Result? Three short stories completed, two more at the end of FW and a book at two thirds of FW! All these in a single year.

Now that’s what I call improvement!