Edits Away!
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jaylake has an interesting post on his editing process, discussing what works for him, and some of the differences that he sees between reading/writing short and long fiction:http://jaylake.livejournal.com/1172183.h
I posted a comment about my own process, saying in relevant part:
Apparently, I'm the oddball in this crowd (don't worry, I'm used to it!) but I much prefer editing to first-drafting. I find it comforting to have the screen filled, to know that I'm "just" massaging things into place. I think that my preference for editing comes from my years of writing as a lawyer, where I spent upwards of 75% of my time editing briefs written by myself or others.
As for staging - I push myself to get a draft written of the entire novel, going back over each approximately-5000-word chapter two to five times to smooth it for sound, sequence, and organization. When I think the chapter is finished, I march on to the next. When I learn that I forgot something or need to tweak something, I put a bold-typeface note to myself at the top of the chapter that needs editing. When I "finish" the last chapter, I go back, fix the bold problems, and then read through the entire thing, start-to-finish, muttered-out-loud to the cats (I usually don't have enough voice to read the whole thing out loud.
* * * END COMMENT * * *
How about you? How does editing work for you?
Mindy, musing on the muse
First rewrite - make sure the storylines have complete arcs. I've been known to start a subplot and not finish it. LOL
Second rewrite - make sure there's not any extra or missing scenes
Third - character and voice check
Fourth - technical check (grammar, spelling, blah, blah, blah)
Theser aren't hard and fast, I might combine a couple. And I let it sit between rewrites, because I always have ideas after I've stopped writing.
But I write, and if I'm happy with it, then I print it out, put it aside, and a week or so later scribble all over it in pen or pencil with assorted edits (line, continuity, and so on), and my remarks range from "When did Bob grow a full head of hair" to "This doesn't work because.." to "Who the heck wrote this?". Then I put THAT aside for a while.
Sometimes a "while" is a lot longer than a week or two. I have a short story I absolutely love, and realize where the problems are, and would love to fix them, but I cannot, for the love of Pete, go back and fix it.
It's as if my brain decides, "Okay, you wrote the story. Great, you found the problems. Let's move on to something else now."
THAT is my weakness when it comes to editing. It's not the editing process itself. It's the "going back and fixing it" part. I know it's a big issue, because it means nothing gets done, and I keep begging people to please kick me in the arse so that I can finish something...
One thing I do like to do to keep the flow going as I write is to mark things I know I need to change with brackets. For example, in medieval-style fantasy I don't like to say "he leaned against a tree" because I think people who live so much closer to nature than we do now would know the specific tree species much better. I would say instead "he leaned against an oak." But if I'm not sure what kind of trees my world has yet, I would just say "he leaned against a [tree]" and then go back later and look for brackets to see where I need to resolve the details.
Of course, this doesn't work in science fiction if you put all the telepathic "speech" or alien gibberish or whatever non-normal conversation the story has in brackets!
I still say if you put three writers in a room, you will find they have at least four different ways of writing.
I do find I spend more time editing than I do writing, because I tweak things until they feel right. But again, I think I spent a lot more time editing *because* I had to often re-read parts to get back into the story after a gap.
Generally, my voice and style emerges when the words first come out. I may have to edit parts to keep that voice consistent, but if it's not there in the first draft, I've never consciously gone back and changed it. Of course, when I'm in a character's head, I feel like I'm channeling them.
(Anonymous)
There's an interesting discussion here http://webnews.sff.net/read?cmd=read&group=sff.people.elizabeth-moon&artnum=128820 about how one person learned to edit in multiple passes, which is what I'm doing. A pass for passive voice. A pass to read out loud and fix flow. A pass for content. Elizabeth Moon's reply is also interesting.
Adrianne
My day job is as a copy editor, which may perhaps explain why I can't write anything without rewriting it several times sort of while I'm writing. Also, if, for example, there's something in chapter 2 that creates a continuity error with chapter 16, I'd much rather discover that while working on chapter 17 than after finishing the epilogue: the sooner I find the problems, the easier they are to fix.
I also send chapters -- occasionally even individual scenes that are giving me grief -- out to my critique group and a couple of other trusted first readers as I finish them, and incorporate the consequences of their reading as soon as I get them back.
Complicating matters is the fact that I skip ahead fairly often -- I all of chapter 7 and most of chapter 6 before writing chapter 5, for example -- which has repercussions in both directions (and has also taught me the valuable lesson that just because I already wrote it, that doesn't mean it ends up happening that way!). And every time I get stuck, I go back and polish existing bits until the characters let me in on what they're going to do next.
So I guess my answer to the question is that I find it very difficult to separate the editing process from the writing process, because I can't write without infinite futzing...
Sigh ...