Two weeks ago I got home from work, threw down my bags, and headed out for a walk with the world’s smartest dog determined to talk myself out of my hatred of editing. I don’t know that it’s pure unadulterated hatred as much as a deep dislike. Even writing down the word “dislike” seems to be a stretch; after all it’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve provided critiques all the way down to the grammar level when called upon to do so in my writing group. I’ve even been asked by those at my day gig to edit lengthy pieces of prose due to what has been called my “editor’s eye.”
It had to be something else. But what? What was different?
That’s when it came to me. It was me. I had a problem editing my own work. I just hadn’t seen it, as it must have been buried under the year old stack of stories that I was updating.
It’s not an uncommon problem, as I’ve talked about this with fellow writers before, so I decided to take my own advice and start off by muscling through it.
The longer I put it off, the less likely that I’ll ever start. Armed with my ability to call Happy New Year whenever I feel like it, I decided to proclaim the start of a new year in editing with my first resolution being the submission of two of my unedited pieces to new markets.
I began by printing out a story to edit it by hand. After a liberal amount of bleeding red ink all over the page I realized why I was loath to come down this path: I was destroying the very thing that I had created. At very least it was becoming something else. Just that realization was enough for me to move on; after all, it was still something that was mine.
I also saw that I was spending too much time on the little stuff up front. A comma here, an adjective there… Blech. I was creating a creating a grammatically flawless, vanilla story. No good. I stepped back and decided to drive on in waves tackling the big stuff first (i.e., story flow and characters), followed by less big stuff (i.e., scene structure and dialog), and ending up with the details (i.e., descriptions and grammar/spelling.)
The good news… I’m just about ready to push out three stories that I started back in January of last year.
Anyone else have any stories of editing nightmares that they’d like to share?
Loading ...
QUICK UPDATE: Looks like I’m going to need another pass at those stories, but at least they’re moving along.
–J
You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view
Much obliged Scratchth!
Just recently I started punching posts up with pictures more often and I’m feeling my way through on finding my voice for the blog.
Good post. I study something tougher on totally different blogs everyday. It’ll all the time be stimulating to read content from other writers and apply a bit something from their store. I’d favor to use some with the content on my weblog whether you don’t mind. Natually I’ll offer you a hyperlink on your net blog. Thanks for sharing.