Editing

While we’re talking about writing, I think it’s a good idea to talk about editing a little bit. Editing is a son of a bitch. I actually think after a while it starts to get a little fun, spinning things around, turning a mess of a sentence into something indispensible, seeing a story grow from a first draft into something approaching good (and believe me, I’ve never written a worthwhile first draft in my life, and I don’t know anybody who has). But it is a son of a bitch.

And it is because the thing you’re looking at when you start editing is almost always completely different from what you end up with. For example, I have a story on the burner right now that is about 17 pages long, and before even starting the rewrite, I know that I have to completely scrap half of the storyline. The first draft is essentially an A story and a B story that run parallel to each other. One is grounded in reality, and the other is low key fantasy. Feedback that I’ve gotten has sounded unanimously like this: “The two stories are redundant, and the reality based one is by far the stronger of the two. But my favorite parts were all fantasy elements.”

Ugh. That’s a helpful paradox? The key always seemed to be finding a way to make the two stories relevant to each other instead of simply parallel to each other. But every way that I worked out to do that either turned it into a moral story, or a boring story – both of which would deeply sabotage the weight of the story itself. The other option was to get rid of one half of it and refine the other. But whichever half I got rid of would eliminate a critical element of the story at large. It finally struck me that since the A and B story were telling the same story to begin with, they should just be the same story.

But that means half of the text will be completely lifted from the story right off the bat, with its critical elements reintegrated into the rest of the text, which will then itself have to be edited not only for story and style, but also for continuity problems that the first step might cause. And that will probably force me to completely rewrite about 90% of the remaining text.

But that’s just what editing is. Once you’ve figured out the problem that a story has it usually means that even the parts that are good need to be significantly reworked to account for the changes that need to be made. You should just see the first draft of About as Long… (you won’t, by the way). That story is only about page and a half to begin with, and the first draft would be unrecognizable (unrecognizably bad) to you.

It’s kind of fun. I mean, in that son of a bitchy way.