Editing…

If your anything like me, the very idea fills you with dread. I hear there are others that enjoy this craft of tweaking and perfecting, and I like to call those people Unicorns! (I’m looking at you Erin) Editing is the topic of this month’s Wriye Blogging Circle so I may as well jump right into it.

What’s your plan of attack for editing? Is it a chore for you? Do you enjoy it? What’s the hardest thing for you in the editing process?

My plan of attack when it comes to editing is always to break it into smaller, easier to swallow bites. If I sit down with the purpose of ‘editing my novel’ I usually find other things that just HAVE to be done first and escape as quickly as possible. I find it much easier if I break it into Chapters so when I sit down to edit, I only have to get through this one Chapter. Tomorrow I’ll move onto the next Chapter and so on and so on until I’ve completed the novel. There’s something about this method that helps make the task seem manageable.

I find editing a chore. There’s really no way around it, I just do. I would much rather be creating new material than sitting down and slogging through what I’ve already written. Unfortunately, I also know that its completely necessary and as I’ve matured as an author, I’ve learned to ‘suck it up’ and get it done. I would like to note that the more that I do edit, the better my first drafts become. I often start to see patterns of mistakes and when I’ve corrected the same one over and over in a couple novels, I find myself avoiding that problem in the first place on new projects! This makes editing much easier as I go on as I’ve got cleaner first drafts to work with and can concentrate more on the content mistakes rather than grammar and punctuation.

The hardest thing about the editing process for me is just finding the motivation to sit down and do it. I know I don’t like it, I know its boring compared to writing new stuff, but its got to be done. In the end I know I’m going to make the novel a better novel and that I’m likely going to find tidbits that I can use in later novels that I’d forgotten I’d added. I know I’m going to find little character traits that I’d developed in later novels and can now go back and hint at in my previous novels. Really, I just need to sit down and do it!

What’s the best and/or worst editing advice you have ever received?

My best editing advice I’ve been given (which was really something I read online and I can’t even remember where), was to read it aloud. Sometimes my grammar may not be the best, but I find that when I read my novel aloud during the editing process I can find mistakes that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I know that if I trip over a sentence than something must be wrong with it. I may not know exactly WHAT grammar mistake I’ve made, but I know there’s one in there. A lot of my typos get found this way as well, rather than reading over it too fast to notice.

The more I take my time and do the editing the I need to, the better I get at it. The faster I identify the mistakes and fix them. Its a worthwhile task and its slowly getting less and less painful. (Not painless, of course, but less painful)