The writing game (playing with words)
L'Eplattenier, Barb

BARB: I wanted to talk about a writing time that happened for me when I was in undergraduate. I was an English major and of course we did a lot of writing, mostly creative writing. I have notions of being a poet which thankfully I have been dissuaded of, but I was writing a paper and my then boyfriend is a novelist and he looked it over for me at one point and began to edit it for me. Really like line by line copy editing and going through and crossing out extraneous words and moving things around for clarity and just sort of doing his very, very careful reading of the work that I had done. All of sudden that was the moment that I started to see writing as a puzzle and you can really play with things and you can really tighten up writing in ways that I had never considered before. I was the first moment for me that I saw the writing process as a playful thing and a thing that you can look at and thing about how can I actually make this better. That was like the skies opening up for me and I think about it often when I'm doing my own revision, my line by line stuff.