100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 2)

50) How to Survive Editing

Congratulations if you've stuck around to this section! You're officially halfway through 100 Things (and so am I—this is a work in progress, after all!) What could be a more fitting end for a book mainly dealing with surviving as a writer than Editing?

When I talk to people who've had to edit something they've written, there are two groups of writers. One group, seemingly the largest and the most vocal, HATE editing. 

I'm not one of them. I fall into the group that actually enjoys the process. This is something one can change, though. It's possible to learn how to love all things editing. The secret lies in how one looks at the process.

Generally speaking, the people who hate editing see the process in two very negative ways, which just makes it all so much harder. Believe it or not, almost all of the writing process is psychological in at least some way. For example, it's much easier to finish books after you finished one book the first time. The simple reason is that once you know what it takes to write a book, it looks a lot more doable than before when you had no idea.

Likewise, it's actually easy to make the whole editing process easier simply by tricking your mind into certain ways of thinking. Okay, tricking one's mind can be a bit of a process on its own, because the way you think is a habit you have to learn. That said, teaching oneself a new habit is a whole lot easier than editing while you hate it.

There are three tricks I use whenever editing feels like a drag:

1) Editing is not cutting babies.

I know, I know. Writing a book is a special process. We build a relationship with our writing, with our stories, with our characters. Towards the end, we just love our stories so much that there's nothing we'd love more than to hug it and squeeze it and call it George.

Boy, I know. Nothing makes me happier than writing The End at the bottom of a finished draft.

More than that, drafts are personal. More than any other part of the process, this is where our souls get most involved. Writers can't write well without being emotionally invested, so we invest time, tears, emotions... Almost like a mother and child.

This is great for writing, because those emotions make the writing real to readers, but they can become problematic once we get around to editing.

Because us writers have this tendency of wanting to protect our babies (stories) even if we know there are things wrong with it. This becomes worse when writers get other readers in who suggest changes to things the writer never even realized needed fixing. Or even—gasp—something the writer likes.

With emotions involved, editing becomes emotionally fraught and suddenly, implementing any suggestion becomes like taking a scalpel to your baby's face.

This is completely, utterly unnecessary.

More than that, it makes effective editing almost impossible to do. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why I always suggest writers take time off from their WiP once the draft is done. Personally, I've found it's even better if I can work on a totally new draft in that time so I can gain even more emotional distance before editing.

This distance is important, because you can then see that your book is not your baby. It's something that has been created by you, yes, but it is something that can and should be improved. That improvement can't be an emotional exercise. It must come from the mind.

The first thing that must be decided on starting revisions is this: What is your artistic vision for your story? Usually, we know this instinctively, but once we're aware of this, it's easy to see where our rough drafts fall short.