An Ode to Editing
There’s nothing like editing to make you wish you had never become a writer in the first place.
I’m… mostly kidding there. I realize I rant about editing a lot on this blog and I would apologize but, I feel like writers aren’t being real when they talk about the process and act like it’s all sunshine and roses. Yeah maybe ‘writing’ is… the first draft, but editing? Editing is sunburns and thorns. Editing is realizing that your sunny day is actually a fucking thunder storm and your roses are dead and wilted. Editing is being stuck in the haunted forest with 800 wolves chasing you from all directions.
It’s not pretty.
The good news is, and yes there is good news, editing is where you make the sunshine you thought you had, become a reality. Editing is where, eventually the roses become beautiful and alive again. There is a way out of the haunted forest, there is a way past the wolves and there is a light at the end of the tunnel (and surprisingly it’s not a train, although sometimes it can be so look out for that).
Editing is easily the most difficult part of the writing process, but it’s also the most important. Anyone can write a novel. Writing is the easy part, but it’s in the editing that the real test of a writers mettle is found. It’s the editing that separates the real writers from the amateurs and wannabes. Editing is not for the faint of heart, and if it feels too easy that might be because it is. Rare is the author who doesn’t need editing, so don’t expect that your story is perfectly fine, because that isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to be willing to be honest with yourself, sometimes brutally so. You have to be willing to look at what you’ve created and if it’s garbage say so. But you also have to remember that it’s easy to get lost, often times when you’re writing you can’t see the forest through the trees as they say. So it’s important to know in advance what the bigger picture is. What’s the overall story you want the reader to come away with? Are you getting to the point or do your readers get lost in the forest with you?
There’s lots of different ways to edit, and I highly encourage trying out different things to see what works for you, it could take you years to finally reach that point that you say… oh I like this. It took me the better part of twelve or thirteen years to figure out a different way of editing I like. Check out blogs that offer editing tips and tricks, but keep in mind eventually everyone has to know when to say when.
Editing can be a vicious cycle, you can spend years editing and sometimes it may feel like there’s no end in sight. If it is in fact true that ‘Art is never really finished merely abandoned’ then you have to reach the point of being able to comfortably abandon the story enough to put it out into the world. The ‘finished product’ looks different for everyone. Maybe that will take you 3 drafts maybe 20, but eventually you have to find a way to say, there’s no more I can do. There’s always one more word you could have changed or one more comma or one more something you could have done differently. Eventually though, you have to say. This is it.
Ultimately, editing is a balancing act between this is terrible let’s fix it, and this is my story and I’m sticking too it.
