At some point, when the writing process ends, the editing begins. That's how it's supposed to work, right? Whatever the process you employ to put a book together, there is a conclusion to it all. You should be able to wrap it up, send it off to publishers and wait for the likely - if not inevitable - letter of rejection. You need one more to fill in the last remaining spot on that wall you've been using them to paper.
Always there's hope of acceptance, though. So you go on. Being published may not be why we write, but being accepted is a good thing. It helps pay some bills, anyway. And it justifies why we spend so much time seeming sedentary to everyone else in the world.
The problem most of us have is that we haven't arrived at our destination - becoming good enough at writing to be popular and able to afford writing as a career. Until we do and turn our hobby into a profession, we can't afford professional editors. Sometimes we can't afford them even if we have turned writing into a profession. So, in lieu of such services, we end up editing our own material. This is generally a bad idea for many reasons.
Foremost, you're going to skip over a lot of little things, not noticing redundancies or that for the last ten sentences you've started off with the personal pronoun 'I'. You may skip over words altogether. Why? Because it's natural. Everyone does it, even professional editors. There are ways around it, but usually the reason someone is a good editor - good enough to charge money for editing - is that they naturally find typos, misspelled words and bad grammar. Somehow they can look at a page and zero in on the miscues like a heat-seeking missile on a warm body.
Editors are either born or created, I'm not sure which. Are they a godsend to a writer or the bane of any creative person's existence? That one's debatable. A good editor will give advice and suggestions. A bad editor will try to rewrite something you've spent a good chunk of your life creating. Certainly, you need to clean-up a piece of writing before sending it to a real editor. So you will have to edit your own stuff from time to time. But a writer should not be the final editor of anything. Trust me on that.
Your own bullshit wears thin quickly. You are about to bore yourself to sleep ten to twenty pages into a book you wrote. Sorry to break that news to you, but reading your crap is going to do one of two things. Either it disgusts you into giving up a potentially rewarding writing career or render you brain dead, unconscious or just numb and dumb from overexposure to something you wrote a while back that - at the time - you believed was especially brilliant. There is something to be said about the quality of a piece of writing - or lack thereof - if in the course of his or her reading it, the author is rendered comatose.
Having said all that, you, as the author, know the story too well. You created it. So a lot of the interest a stranger - a.k.a. your audience - might find in reading your piece is removed from the work whenever you feast your eyes. I think of it this way: irony exists in the world because God didn't want His creation to bore Him, so be glad He lets us in on the joke sometimes. Anyway, the same sort of thing can apply for a writer and his or her work. Make everything as interesting as you can because you are going to read it many times.
All writing is a work in progress, so you'll never finish editing something. Things you wrote years ago and set aside for later review are immediately thrust to the front burner as soon as you look at them. You may notice errors in other people's writing whenever you read it but your own writing is forever subject to personal review and alteration. Should you get to the end of a piece and feel like there's something missing, you immediately start another session. If not, you bravely arrive at a moment of elation. A wave of euphoria passes over you as you feel completion is at hand. Celebration is in order!
Crack open a beer, pop the cork on a bottle of champagne or wine, it's party time! The spouse or significant other gets an invitation to dinner or a night out on the town. It's only fair. After all, you've been ignoring him or her for weeks, months or years during your creative spurt. If you're still a significant couple after all that neglect, your other has been very patient and understanding along the way. At some point, though, you will open the file and start reading it anew and, alas, a new edit begins.
The only way to combat this urge to perpetually work on a piece of writing is to submit a work to review for publication. It seems this signals some finality - at least until it is rejected or whatever. Afterward, especially if it is rejected, you try to improve it with additional effort. Sometimes, even if the damned thing is published, you end up going through it again. That's what second and subsequent editions are for, right?
Writing is a process. As such, you continue to learn how to write while you're writing. This is similar to something called 'undersplaining'. That's a word I made up a while back to describe how economists answer questions for which they don't know the answers - which is just about all the time. If you've ever listened to the nation's chief economist, you know what I'm talking about - as opposed to what he or she was talking about.
One thing you need to remember is that any writer can be a good story teller well in advance of ever being a good writer. Maybe you'll evolve into some prolific sort of person who can bang out a decent story on the fly with hardly an error, but that's an extremely rare achievement, comparable to winning a Power Ball jackpot. Actually, I think the odds are better with the lottery.
Ordinarily, you'll suffer through the learning curve until it flattens out. At that instant you've reached what's called the point of diminishing returns. Continuing to learn, you never seem to get as much out of the experience as you think you should. Worse you may suffer from the momentary hubris of wrongful assumptions - that you actually know what the hell you're doing. That happens whenever there doesn't appear to be all that much room for improvement left ahead. There's always enough time to find something wrong with anything. Under the guise of reading through a piece just one more time, I'm sure you'll find yourself reaching for a pen or the keyboard, your fingers twitching and sweat breaking out on your brow as you itch to edit.
Years into the process, whether you learn anything further about writing depends on your desire, motivation and, sometimes, your susceptibility to the influence of whatever novel you have been reading on the side. You see, writers also learn from reading the works of other writers. That's a good thing for the most part, as long as you don't become a clone of some famous or semi-famous author. Usually one of any author is more than enough at any given time.
Denial about what you're doing when you're editing is another issue. It starts with calling what you're doing 'revisions'. Technically, a revision is pretty much the same thing as editing, so in the mind of someone who works with words, it is a matter of semantics and therefore easily confused. In practice, though, editing is taking what is there and fixing the minor details without structurally or materially altering the content. Some might argue that anytime an author of a piece edits it, that constitutes a revision. What is the actual case is that an editing session rapidly turns into a major revision, just because it's the writer involved in the editing and he or she is naturally inclined to revise as opposed to editing a piece.
An actual revision is something between an edit and a full-blown rewrite. The latter is when you pretty much throw out everything and start over. Back in the day of typewriters, when composing anything was actually done on paper, it involved wadding up a page and trying to hit the trash can with it. The waste paper basket needed to be across the room, of course. That made it more of a challenge, simultaneously creating the illusion of exercise and sport. After a while, I became pretty good at making the three-point shots from beyond half court in the arena of my study.
Here in the more modern world, there is the delete key and the trash or recycling bin on the operating system's desktop. I miss the trash can, now - figuratively.
The problem with an honest-to-god revision is that you will never know how good a previous idea was or might have been. You scrapped it. A serious push forward with some real editing could have done the trick, but you'll never know. You burned that bridge. Of course there are other ideas. Chase those geese until you trip over something important along the way.
Writers can tend to over-write things especially while editing/revising. There is always more story to tell, isn't there? Sometimes less is better. Scratch that. Often less is better as far as writing goes.
This brings me to a touchy subject. It's about the difference between a short story and a novel. Contrary to uninformed fantasy, a novel is not a long or extended short story. It's not a bunch of short stories, either. That would be called, aptly, 'a collection of short stories' or perhaps an anthology through which a thematic thread of continuity exists.
Writing a short story is a balancing act. Sometimes you're on a high wire walking over a bed of broken glass and sharp spikes without a safety net. Does it get any better than that? It depends. A short story never needs to be confused with any other type of writing. Clearly it is not poetry, although some prose writers wax poetic at times. Occasionally, a decent paragraph or two might work as a free or blank verse poem. But I think short stories should remain in their corner of the literary arena, leaving poetry to poets.
Short stories are structured differently in order to convey a point or message with a dominant theme in the process of creating a character or two within a specific setting or context. Like a poem, a short story doesn't need to be long. There is a reason it's called a 'short' story, after all. Great poetry, in my humble and mostly unprofessional estimation, says a lot in a little space. Any writing needs to have just enough space to convey what is intended. Yes, it's up to the writer to be concise.
Editing and revising a novel takes a lot of time. Even if you do nothing else, it takes about three of four days to plow through a couple hundred pages with any kind of meticulous attention. It's insufferably boring to read that much of your own stuff. And, no matter how often you are compelled to add in some new tangent, you must resist because you are well aware where that may lead - another novel!
Why would anyone who writes novels ever want to edit his or her own stuff? It's beyond me. Where's the excitement and the fun? It's nothing like writing a new one. That's always an adventure.
Composing a novel is more like plate juggling - you know, spinning them atop those flexible rods, trying to keep any from wobbling and crashing down to the floor. Why, you can have sixteen characters, each of them like a plate. You cannot do anything like that with a short story - or a poem for that matter. Therefore, a novel is not nor should it ever be confused with a story. Don't even think of it as a story. It's not.
Yes, certainly, there are stories contained within a novel. There is an overall theme tying things together, a thread of continuity through each of the stories as they are told and relate the characters. The characters have a relationship of some sort, often the stories they tell provide the linkage. The foundation for all of it is the plot, where those characters' stories converge. Season everything with a little conflict and intrigue and you have a novel in progress.
As a writer, a plot can sneak up from behind. You'll be sitting at your computer typing (or evoking the age-old method of hunt-and-peck) about a particular character and there it is, a plot line - a connection between two or more characters. While one of your characters is distracting you, another may be mugging you, stealing a credit card while yet another is calling to use the card for ordering a large pizza with everything but anchovies to be delivered post haste.
Having regained your wallet and credit card you acquiesce to the need to eat something. You chastise the character who ordered the pizza because he or she added on the exorbitantly priced two litre bottle of soda when there are three sitting in the fridge already.
You hear a scream from the apartment downstairs. Listening, hoping nothing is wrong, of course, you sort of expect something more to happen. Without anything further appearing to be going on, you look at the computer screen and there it is, your main character is telling you something is wrong. Margaret is missing. She said she was going to Spain for a holiday, but she hasn't made it back.
Now you have a mystery to consider while you answer the door. It's the pizza delivery guy. He needs to see your credit card. So you run back to retrieve your wallet from where you left it on your desk - remembering that earlier you had a pretty decent wrestling match with one of your characters over possession of that scrap of leather. Hurrying back, you flash the card to the driver and you give the delivery guy a tip because they don't get paid enough otherwise. You bring the pizza to your desk and continue writing, splitting the large pie with your newfound friends while you listen to them tell you all about themselves - their likes and dislikes. Oh, and what about Margaret. Has anyone heard from her?
That's what writing a novel is like. Now, why would anybody want to edit or revise one? Where's the fun in that?
Always there's hope of acceptance, though. So you go on. Being published may not be why we write, but being accepted is a good thing. It helps pay some bills, anyway. And it justifies why we spend so much time seeming sedentary to everyone else in the world.
The problem most of us have is that we haven't arrived at our destination - becoming good enough at writing to be popular and able to afford writing as a career. Until we do and turn our hobby into a profession, we can't afford professional editors. Sometimes we can't afford them even if we have turned writing into a profession. So, in lieu of such services, we end up editing our own material. This is generally a bad idea for many reasons.
Foremost, you're going to skip over a lot of little things, not noticing redundancies or that for the last ten sentences you've started off with the personal pronoun 'I'. You may skip over words altogether. Why? Because it's natural. Everyone does it, even professional editors. There are ways around it, but usually the reason someone is a good editor - good enough to charge money for editing - is that they naturally find typos, misspelled words and bad grammar. Somehow they can look at a page and zero in on the miscues like a heat-seeking missile on a warm body.
Editors are either born or created, I'm not sure which. Are they a godsend to a writer or the bane of any creative person's existence? That one's debatable. A good editor will give advice and suggestions. A bad editor will try to rewrite something you've spent a good chunk of your life creating. Certainly, you need to clean-up a piece of writing before sending it to a real editor. So you will have to edit your own stuff from time to time. But a writer should not be the final editor of anything. Trust me on that.
Your own bullshit wears thin quickly. You are about to bore yourself to sleep ten to twenty pages into a book you wrote. Sorry to break that news to you, but reading your crap is going to do one of two things. Either it disgusts you into giving up a potentially rewarding writing career or render you brain dead, unconscious or just numb and dumb from overexposure to something you wrote a while back that - at the time - you believed was especially brilliant. There is something to be said about the quality of a piece of writing - or lack thereof - if in the course of his or her reading it, the author is rendered comatose.
Having said all that, you, as the author, know the story too well. You created it. So a lot of the interest a stranger - a.k.a. your audience - might find in reading your piece is removed from the work whenever you feast your eyes. I think of it this way: irony exists in the world because God didn't want His creation to bore Him, so be glad He lets us in on the joke sometimes. Anyway, the same sort of thing can apply for a writer and his or her work. Make everything as interesting as you can because you are going to read it many times.
All writing is a work in progress, so you'll never finish editing something. Things you wrote years ago and set aside for later review are immediately thrust to the front burner as soon as you look at them. You may notice errors in other people's writing whenever you read it but your own writing is forever subject to personal review and alteration. Should you get to the end of a piece and feel like there's something missing, you immediately start another session. If not, you bravely arrive at a moment of elation. A wave of euphoria passes over you as you feel completion is at hand. Celebration is in order!
Crack open a beer, pop the cork on a bottle of champagne or wine, it's party time! The spouse or significant other gets an invitation to dinner or a night out on the town. It's only fair. After all, you've been ignoring him or her for weeks, months or years during your creative spurt. If you're still a significant couple after all that neglect, your other has been very patient and understanding along the way. At some point, though, you will open the file and start reading it anew and, alas, a new edit begins.
The only way to combat this urge to perpetually work on a piece of writing is to submit a work to review for publication. It seems this signals some finality - at least until it is rejected or whatever. Afterward, especially if it is rejected, you try to improve it with additional effort. Sometimes, even if the damned thing is published, you end up going through it again. That's what second and subsequent editions are for, right?
Writing is a process. As such, you continue to learn how to write while you're writing. This is similar to something called 'undersplaining'. That's a word I made up a while back to describe how economists answer questions for which they don't know the answers - which is just about all the time. If you've ever listened to the nation's chief economist, you know what I'm talking about - as opposed to what he or she was talking about.
One thing you need to remember is that any writer can be a good story teller well in advance of ever being a good writer. Maybe you'll evolve into some prolific sort of person who can bang out a decent story on the fly with hardly an error, but that's an extremely rare achievement, comparable to winning a Power Ball jackpot. Actually, I think the odds are better with the lottery.
Ordinarily, you'll suffer through the learning curve until it flattens out. At that instant you've reached what's called the point of diminishing returns. Continuing to learn, you never seem to get as much out of the experience as you think you should. Worse you may suffer from the momentary hubris of wrongful assumptions - that you actually know what the hell you're doing. That happens whenever there doesn't appear to be all that much room for improvement left ahead. There's always enough time to find something wrong with anything. Under the guise of reading through a piece just one more time, I'm sure you'll find yourself reaching for a pen or the keyboard, your fingers twitching and sweat breaking out on your brow as you itch to edit.
Years into the process, whether you learn anything further about writing depends on your desire, motivation and, sometimes, your susceptibility to the influence of whatever novel you have been reading on the side. You see, writers also learn from reading the works of other writers. That's a good thing for the most part, as long as you don't become a clone of some famous or semi-famous author. Usually one of any author is more than enough at any given time.
Denial about what you're doing when you're editing is another issue. It starts with calling what you're doing 'revisions'. Technically, a revision is pretty much the same thing as editing, so in the mind of someone who works with words, it is a matter of semantics and therefore easily confused. In practice, though, editing is taking what is there and fixing the minor details without structurally or materially altering the content. Some might argue that anytime an author of a piece edits it, that constitutes a revision. What is the actual case is that an editing session rapidly turns into a major revision, just because it's the writer involved in the editing and he or she is naturally inclined to revise as opposed to editing a piece.
An actual revision is something between an edit and a full-blown rewrite. The latter is when you pretty much throw out everything and start over. Back in the day of typewriters, when composing anything was actually done on paper, it involved wadding up a page and trying to hit the trash can with it. The waste paper basket needed to be across the room, of course. That made it more of a challenge, simultaneously creating the illusion of exercise and sport. After a while, I became pretty good at making the three-point shots from beyond half court in the arena of my study.
Here in the more modern world, there is the delete key and the trash or recycling bin on the operating system's desktop. I miss the trash can, now - figuratively.
The problem with an honest-to-god revision is that you will never know how good a previous idea was or might have been. You scrapped it. A serious push forward with some real editing could have done the trick, but you'll never know. You burned that bridge. Of course there are other ideas. Chase those geese until you trip over something important along the way.
Writers can tend to over-write things especially while editing/revising. There is always more story to tell, isn't there? Sometimes less is better. Scratch that. Often less is better as far as writing goes.
This brings me to a touchy subject. It's about the difference between a short story and a novel. Contrary to uninformed fantasy, a novel is not a long or extended short story. It's not a bunch of short stories, either. That would be called, aptly, 'a collection of short stories' or perhaps an anthology through which a thematic thread of continuity exists.
Writing a short story is a balancing act. Sometimes you're on a high wire walking over a bed of broken glass and sharp spikes without a safety net. Does it get any better than that? It depends. A short story never needs to be confused with any other type of writing. Clearly it is not poetry, although some prose writers wax poetic at times. Occasionally, a decent paragraph or two might work as a free or blank verse poem. But I think short stories should remain in their corner of the literary arena, leaving poetry to poets.
Short stories are structured differently in order to convey a point or message with a dominant theme in the process of creating a character or two within a specific setting or context. Like a poem, a short story doesn't need to be long. There is a reason it's called a 'short' story, after all. Great poetry, in my humble and mostly unprofessional estimation, says a lot in a little space. Any writing needs to have just enough space to convey what is intended. Yes, it's up to the writer to be concise.
Editing and revising a novel takes a lot of time. Even if you do nothing else, it takes about three of four days to plow through a couple hundred pages with any kind of meticulous attention. It's insufferably boring to read that much of your own stuff. And, no matter how often you are compelled to add in some new tangent, you must resist because you are well aware where that may lead - another novel!
Why would anyone who writes novels ever want to edit his or her own stuff? It's beyond me. Where's the excitement and the fun? It's nothing like writing a new one. That's always an adventure.
Composing a novel is more like plate juggling - you know, spinning them atop those flexible rods, trying to keep any from wobbling and crashing down to the floor. Why, you can have sixteen characters, each of them like a plate. You cannot do anything like that with a short story - or a poem for that matter. Therefore, a novel is not nor should it ever be confused with a story. Don't even think of it as a story. It's not.
Yes, certainly, there are stories contained within a novel. There is an overall theme tying things together, a thread of continuity through each of the stories as they are told and relate the characters. The characters have a relationship of some sort, often the stories they tell provide the linkage. The foundation for all of it is the plot, where those characters' stories converge. Season everything with a little conflict and intrigue and you have a novel in progress.
As a writer, a plot can sneak up from behind. You'll be sitting at your computer typing (or evoking the age-old method of hunt-and-peck) about a particular character and there it is, a plot line - a connection between two or more characters. While one of your characters is distracting you, another may be mugging you, stealing a credit card while yet another is calling to use the card for ordering a large pizza with everything but anchovies to be delivered post haste.
Having regained your wallet and credit card you acquiesce to the need to eat something. You chastise the character who ordered the pizza because he or she added on the exorbitantly priced two litre bottle of soda when there are three sitting in the fridge already.
You hear a scream from the apartment downstairs. Listening, hoping nothing is wrong, of course, you sort of expect something more to happen. Without anything further appearing to be going on, you look at the computer screen and there it is, your main character is telling you something is wrong. Margaret is missing. She said she was going to Spain for a holiday, but she hasn't made it back.
Now you have a mystery to consider while you answer the door. It's the pizza delivery guy. He needs to see your credit card. So you run back to retrieve your wallet from where you left it on your desk - remembering that earlier you had a pretty decent wrestling match with one of your characters over possession of that scrap of leather. Hurrying back, you flash the card to the driver and you give the delivery guy a tip because they don't get paid enough otherwise. You bring the pizza to your desk and continue writing, splitting the large pie with your newfound friends while you listen to them tell you all about themselves - their likes and dislikes. Oh, and what about Margaret. Has anyone heard from her?
That's what writing a novel is like. Now, why would anybody want to edit or revise one? Where's the fun in that?
Kind of self explanatory.
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