5. Is it as direct as possible? 6. Did I leave anything out? We mean this literally—ask yourself these questions, each time. Yes, this is tedious. But if you do this exercise consistently, it becomes second nature. Once that happens, you’ll find that you cannot only cut the fluff out of your book, you can also make your book sharper and more refined, and you’ll be able to hone in on what you are trying to say, and nail it. Do it for each paragraph, then do it for each sentence. If you do this, you’ll have an excellent book. [By the way, I adapted these instructions from George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, which contains editing instructions from arguably the greatest writer of the twentieth century.] [As an optional tool to help you do line-by-line editing, we recom- mend the Hemingway Editor: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/] PART 3: READ-ALOUD EDITING This is an editing process that’s not commonly taught but is a secret trick of numerous bestselling authors. Brené Brown, Neil Strauss, myself—we all do this. When I was first writing I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I had teams of proofreaders working through the book. First I proofread it, then I had the help of professional editor friends, and finally the publishing company had their people do their copyedits. I did not think that a single mistake would sneak by, and happily locked in the manuscript. 166 · ThE SCriBE METhOD