Why Editing Matters... Even If You Never Share Your Novel

The “Now What?” Months are here! In 2014, we’ll be bringing you advice from authors who published their NaNo-novels, editors, agents, and more to help you polish November’s first draft until it gleams. Today, Hannah Rubin, writer and NaNoWriMo intern , shares why it’s important to edit, even if you don’t plan on sharing your novel with anyone else:

At some point, I imagine that I will one day set my sights on the world of publishing—but for now, I am still caught in the indulgent honeymoon phase of simply writing because it is enjoyable, and challenging, and heartbreaking and, at the end of the day, one of the few activities that I can completely lose myself in. 

I’ve spent the last two months slowly meandering through edits: first confronting the metaphysical barrier of convincing myself to print the thing out, and then the physical barrier of actually reading through it. It took me nearly three weeks just to make it through that first part. 

As we dive deeper and deeper into these months of editing and revision, you might be wondering: why am I choosing to edit? Why do I continue to work my story over and over, read through old paragraphs with garish highlighters, pull my hair out over stale dialogue? Jot down possible character descriptions as I ride the train to work? Why not just press SAVE and stick the whole immaterial file somewhere deep into the codings of my computer; why not get started on something new and un-imagined?

Because editing is how you grow as a writer.

In the same way that sketching isn’t drawing and mixing colors isn’t painting: first drafts merely scratch the surface of what it means to really write. Editing is part of writing—they aren’t two separate processes, but rather, one in the same.

If I leave my manuscript untouched I will never learn about myself as a writer. I won’t learn about the things I do that need work, the traps I fall into, the words I overuse. I also won’t learn about the ways in which I write well: the emotions I am able to capture, the sentences that feel like poetry. Editing is how you give yourself feedback on what you’ve done. Think of it as your mind processing your mind.

Allow yourself to be happily surprised by the way you shape words, the images you create, the sensitivities your characters embody. And also allow yourself to be critical, to work through sticky moments, to move things around.

A lot of the time, I think we are afraid to edit because we are afraid of what we might find: afraid that it won’t be as good as we remembered when we were in the throes of imagining it. But, try to remember that just because every word you write isn’t gold doesn’t mean your writing is worthless.

Of course it isn’t easy. Reading back over earlier writing is an eerie task sometimes—revisiting mindsets and mental spaces that were once so vivid. It’s living and re-living the moments of your character’s life, and seeing the forgotten people of your past jump off pages unexpectedly. It means fleshing out every detail, every last shiver, flicker, breath; it’s more than just the color of her bedroom: it’s the stuff of souls.

A teacher once told me that every writer has one story to tell, a story that they tell over and over again in different formulations. How are you supposed to learn what it is that transfixes you if you never give yourself the time and attention to dig into it? Editing is about spending time with your writing. It is how we come to see what our writing is all about, and, by extension, what we are all about.

So, even though the story that I currently have has no beginning, middle, or end—I will continue to work through it day by day, at a pace all my own. Somewhere in that pile of papers is a little kernel of me, of what I’m trying to say. It is only through endless writing and re-writing that I will be able to figure out exactly what that thing is and how best to express it.

Hannah Rubin is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied writing, theory, and the theory of writing. At least that’s what it says on her Facebook.

Top photo by Flickr user Karenee Art.