Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing well. I ask this question because I’m curious about how you approach the editing process. I personally have trouble knowing when something I’ve written is done and should not be edited anymore. Can something always be edited and improved? How do you know when you’re done editing? Are there certain steps you take throughout this process? Do you go back and edit several times? How many drafts do you create? If you share your work, who do you share it with? Do you ever come back to a piece months or even years later? How do you know what should remain or be taken out of your story? If you’ve been published, what was that experience like? I look forward to hearing from you! -Lucia
6 thoughts on “What is the editing process like for you?”
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Hi Lucia,
Thanks for the question. Before I began to formulate a response, I read over some of my peers’ answers and I found myself relating to almost all of their thoughts and struggles regarding editing. I think it becomes so easy to get deeply attached to your own writing, that you do not realize (or at least do not let yourself realize) what needs to be cut out or changed. Editing is actually a struggle that I have needed to really confront in this class in particular. We have been challenged with editing drafts several times and changing our drafts in radical ways (such as reorganizing paragraphs, changing the ending/beginning, changing POV etc). I can’t really say that editing has gotten easier for me, but I have definitely seen the benefits of continuously experimenting with your writing. It definitely helps to get the objective perspective of my peers, and the workshops have been the most effective methods of revealing where my writing needs some help.
Hi Lucia,
While I don’t like to admit it, I tend to edit less than I probably should. I stopped editing assignments for a while in middle and high school. At my school, we had to handwrite all of our essays in blue fountain pen until eighth grade, so if I wanted to draft and revise, I would have had to write it all out multiple times in pencil and then when complete, one final time in perfect blue penmanship before I could turn it in. Since we also had to accompany our essays with illustrations that took much of the time allotted for the writing process, I quickly learned to minimize the amount of time that the writing took. I became highly proficient in spelling and grammar to the extent that I caught all of the more mechanical mistakes as I wrote them and I became very capable of outlining in my head as I wrote so that in the end, I had a perfectly functional essay the first time around. I would start writing in the blue fountain pen right away and hope the first draft was good enough, which at the time, it always was. My writing could always have been better, but the whole process of creating even one draft took so long that I kind of had to find ways to streamline it.
When high school rolled around and I was finally allowed to type out my essays, they were much easier to revise, but I still had those long-learned first-draft-only-draft habits from my handwritten essays and they followed me whenever I wrote. Since what I wrote the first time around was usually passable, I only revised if I particularly loved the subject matter or how I worded certain things (ie if I could see a future for that piece of writing and knew I would absolutely love it if I continued working on it). I still have those habits to some extent and tend to only revise when I need to turn in my revisions, which isn’t great, or when I stumble upon an old piece of writing and feel inspired to tweak it and build off of it. And even when I do, I tend to only edit small phrases or words, rather than the larger structural and content changes I know it probably needs. That’s something I know I need to work on.
I also find it especially difficult to revise poetry. When I write a poem, I write to capture a feeling and I don’t leave the first draft until every sentence is written exactly the way I want to say it to best reflect the feeling. I don’t let myself do anything else until whatever I’ve written sounds exactly like it’s supposed to. I’ve found that whenever I revise poems for class (and going to an artsy middle and high school, I’ve had to do that a lot throughout the years), I lose my connection to the piece when I try to change it. If the words aren’t written exactly as they were at first, the poem no longer carries any meaning to me and I might as well be turning in something that isn’t mine. I’m not sure why this is so different from my experience revising fictional and nonfiction work, I just know that it is.
Editing is by far the most difficult step along the writing process for me personally. I become so attached to my work the letting go of paragraphs or even words is taxing. I often like to write in one state, get everything out of my head, and then let it sit for a while. It’s hard to edit something objectively when you’re still inside of it, the headspace I mean. I have to wait long enough that when I look over the words and sentences I see them in a new way, a different perspective. Then I try my best to make it legible and coherent. I often find it difficult to find links in my writing, it often seems disconnected. After this second round of writing I like to give it to someone I trust enough to be honest with me. I think anyone who I wouldn’t consider a close friend will always try not to hurt my feelings, but a good critic needs to be able to tell me when my writing is bad or doesn’t make sense. They also have to be articulate enough to explain the problem in a way that I can find a solution. I don’t always have a solution, or more often, I have too many solutions, none of which are good.
Hey Lucia,
I would not consider myself apt at editing. I often miss mechanical errors, and fail to find the most coherent way to convey. Because I find it difficult to edit myself, I often get friends (or mom) to help me. I ask them to look for specific things when they are editing: this could be tone, theme, or just comma use. After they edit, I make a point to review their edits sharply, I do not want to lose my voice in this process. I appreciate all their edits but I only use the ones that I think build the piece. If there are points that I am particularly hung up on, I always follow my gut, I think it is important to trust your instinct, especially in creative writing.
Hi Lucia,
This is such an interesting question and something that I struggle with as well. We edit to create better versions of what was there before, but I’m always scared that in the process of trimming the fat I’ll end up cutting a vital vein. I’ve gotten into the (bad?) habit of saving multiple versions of the same draft where maybe the only thing that’s changed is a sentence here, a wording there, so that in the event that I change my mind and use it later, I haven’t lost it to the backspace button forever. I think time is a huge factor for me in editing. The more time between me and the piece, the easier it is to read it through objective eyes and kill my darlings. But, in the end, nothing beats feedback from a person whose opinion you value and trust.
Hi Lucia,
This is hard. I’ve long had a tendency to edit as I go, which teachers have tried to gently discourage in favor of editing with more complete drafts. When I can really commit to this “shitty first draft” approach, followed by methodical drafts of revisions, I tend to be pretty satisfied with the results. But I find this works best with longer form pieces, like short stories or essays. When it comes to poetry, my editing process tends to take forever, because it involves coming back again and again to the piece and making tiny changes to the rhythm, the structure, the word choice, the images…
This is to say that I think my editing process is different depending on the form I’m working with and the timeframe I have to revise. I’m also the sort of person who feels like my pieces probably won’t ever be completely ready. Sometimes this means that I revise painstakingly, over and over. Other times it means I throw my hands up after a second draft and say “that’s the best it’s gonna get!”