My Passion's Pen

by Fae Rowen

Skimming is defined as a crime.

If you skim money from your job, you’re going to jail. (Or worse depending who you work for.) Skimming is also defined as removing floating matter from a liquid. Can you say pond scum? That brings us to the final definition of skimming, as it pertains to your story: “To glance through and read quickly or superficially.”

As writers, this is the one that can kill a career–even before it begins.

Why do we skim when we read? We’re in a hurry to get through the boring, the uninteresting, the unnecessary details because we want to get to “the good stuff.” Unfortunately, as humans we want to speed through those same ordinary parts of our days. And we want to turbo-boost through the rough (i.e. the character-building) parts of our own lives.

If you’re skimming through your life, you…