Editing is the work

First drafts are evidence of effort. Final drafts are evidence of taste.

Most writers finish a draft and feel like they've finished. They haven't. They've completed step one of three. The next two are what separates the people who get read from the people who get politely ignored.

Editing is the work. Writing is the warmup.

What editing actually does:

Cuts the parts that exist because you needed to think them but the reader doesn't need to read them. The first three paragraphs of most drafts. The throat-clearing. The hedges. The "as I was saying earlier" callbacks.

Tightens the sentences that don't punch. Replaces "in order to" with "to." Replaces "the fact that" with the noun. Replaces three-syllable Latin words with one-syllable Anglo-Saxon ones.

Reorders the structure. Most drafts bury the lede because the writer found the lede on the way to the end. The edit moves it back to the start.

Kills the metaphors that almost worked. Almost-working metaphors are the worst kind. They sound impressive and confuse the reader. Cut them.

The painful part of editing is rejecting your own work, sentence by sentence. Most of what you wrote was a path to what you'll keep, not the keeper itself.

Three rules I follow:

Edit cold, not hot. Wait twenty-four hours after the first draft. The version of you who wrote it can't see what's wrong with it. Tomorrow's version can.

Read aloud. The sentence that trips your tongue is the sentence that trips the reader.

If you cut more than you keep, you're doing it right.

The published piece is half the words of the first draft. That's not a reduction. It's the discipline.