Creative Chaos

ecently I read an article by Publishing Crawl in which an author suggested that one of the best ways to ensure that your book is everything you want it to be during rewrites is to be super organized. Like, color-coated sticky notes and everything.

This is… waaay too organized for me.

But one really interesting point that she made in the article was the idea of knowing what you want your book to be (if it were perfect) before you edit. You have an idea in your mind before you edit (which one would think you would do before you even started writing), and then you read over your novel and make notes of all the issues, plot, character, setting, consistency etc. And work from there, then you do a line edit.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never done this that editing is always hell for me because I tackle everything at the same time. I don’t generally read the whole novel making notes about things that need particular help, I pretty much do everything at once. I’m not even sure I could stand to read my entire novel without making some kind of change to it at some point or another, before the end, it would drive me mad, because I know that if I don’t get it when I see it, I might forget by the time it comes around again. That said, maybe it’s time I make life easier on myself with regards to editing. Worst case scenario, I try this new form of editing and learn, as I have in the past with other forms of editing strategy that it just doesn’t work for me.

I’m curious though, because editing is such a major part of the writing process, and to say the least inescapable, how do you edit? Do you work like the aforementioned color-coated sticky note method? Or do you, like me, try to attack everything at once? I’d love to hear your thoughts.