Yes, I take that meaning as well. I can't think of any other word that would encompass all phases of 'the stuff you do after you've written your first draft.' I'd say 'editing' covers the lot. However, some people prefer to 'edit as they go,' while others prefer to wait till the whole first draft is done. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't really matter—it's editing, no matter when you make your changes. I do both, although my 'ongoing' edit is mostly for glaring sentence errors or repetitions and perhaps slight revision of dialogue, etc. I didn't catch any 'major revision' issues until after I got the whole thing done. If I had, I'd have corrected them as an ongoing thing. Maybe marked where I saw the light, so I'd know I need to go back from that point and make necessary changes. Dunno. I know I wouldn't spend a lot of time polishing prose until after the whole thing is done. I'm hoping that my new novel will contain fewer major 'mistakes' than the first one did. I feel I've learned a lot doing the first one without any guidance at all. Now that I've had guidance, there are certain things I'm more careful with, and more aware of, as I write the first draft.
Fair enough. But when people are saying that it doesn't make sense to edit as you go because you might end up cutting that part out... that argument only makes sense if they're thinking of editing as copy editing, right? Like, if the editing I'm doing is cutting out a whole section, their argument would be "It doesn't make sense to cut out a whole section as you go because you might end up cutting out that whole section." Which makes no sense. But I can see how it would make sense, at least for some writers, to say "It doesn't make sense to polish as you go because you might end up cutting out that whole section." So that particular argument only really works for people who mean "polish" when they say "edit".
Oh, yeah ...I see what you mean. No, I would certainly 'edit as I go' if I caught myself making a huge story mistake. There's no point in continuing to write stuff you know isn't working, is there? I was editing my original post (a couple of posts back) when you responded here ...so I did change what I said a bit, to make it clearer. My only finished experience thus far is my huge novel, and I didn't actually catch any major issues needing story revision till after I was done. (Then they came tumbling out of the woodwork.) If I had caught them earlier, I would have made the changes at the time. They weren't so much 'mistakes' as stuff I no longer needed because the story's focus had changed—or stuff that needed to be re-written for the same reason. It's polishing prose that I leave till afterwards. It's one of those little things that I can probably keep changing till the day I die. I need to know when to stop! If I had got prematurely hung up on that phase of 'editing,' I would never have got past Chapter One.
It depends on the type of literature you are writing. For example, poetry is different from essay writing and the same applies for short story and a narrative. As for me i try to do my best; Furthermore, it has to do with the mood of the writer; sometimes he feels himself obliged to edit many times while writing, at other times he feels that his thoughts being expressed as easy as he could ever imagined. Bottom line is that a true writer should never give up his career.
I must edit as I go. Cannot stand to see the little red lines from misspelled words. Those are corrected immediately. Punctuation and grammar are corrected at the end of every paragraph. It takes me forever to get a paragraph the way I want it. Then I will go back later and do it again and sometimes again. Everything I do is a continual WIP. Must be the business admin. in me.
I think it was William Faulkner who was asked how he spent his day. He said that he spent the entire morning deciding to take out a word from his manuscript, and the entire afternoon deciding to put it back. So you're in good company. For me, correcting misspellings and punctuation "on the fly" doesn't count as editing. For me, editing involves considering alternate words and phrasings, deletions of stuff where necessary, and overall flow. Those I leave for another time, lest I become obsessed with details to the point where I lose momentum. I might add that "overall flow" is something that I really can't evaluate until I've written a few hundred words, so attempting to do so on the first paragraph or two is bound to be a futile exercise.
I follow the NaNoWriMo editing philosophy: get the words out now, make them pretty later. I like the first draft to be all about the magic of the story. If I start to edit, then it bogs down the process and I can't get lost in it as much. Takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.
I have to slap myself if I try to edit as I go. (unless it's a major mistake) my biggest challenge is to not stop and fix spelling errors. Those damn red lines pop up allover the place.
Same. Unless it's a major plotpoint that needs to be changed for the course of the story, leave it be. For my part, I'm constantly adding in extra words like "actually". Although that's mostly on the stories I worked on for NaNoWriMo.
I used to edit as I write until I realised it was holding me back. It would take me forever to get a chapter done because I was trying to make it word perfect. It was killing my flow. It's only now that I've taught myself to accept the first draft can be rubbish that I've found a more natural flow. Because I'm open to anything the story starts to fall into place by itself. I know I can clean up any problems later when I can see the picture as a whole. To put it another way, it would be madness, quite impossible and messy to decorate a cake before you bake it.
This thread has me thinking of my various definitions of edit: - Correcting typos or grammatical or punctuation errors that are only barely above typos, like starting a phrase in plural and switching to singular, realizing that that comma should be a semicolon, that sort of thing. I tend to backspace or quick-fix these the instant that I notice them, because their presence distracts me. - Correcting internal paragraph architecture--that sentence should be at the end, that paragraph should be two paragraphs, etc. If I'm not flowing all that well, I tend to do that every, oh, three to ten paragraphs. If I am flowing, I'll keep going until the flow stops, and then go back and edit, because I enjoy editing and it may kickstsart the flow again. (I enjoy editing so much that if I flowed through five thousand words that I then edit step by step by step down to one thousand, that's OK.) - Correcting inter-paragraph architecture--that paragraph should be above that one, except then that sentence needs to move down two paragraphs and be merged with those two sentences and hey, now I can kill that repeated phrase and neatly compress those three sentences into one, etc. If I'm not flowing all that well, I tend to do that either at a transition (Merry was arguing with Adelaide, and now she's arguing with Jane) or at, very very roughly, the 500 word mark. If I am flowing then, again, I keep flowing. - Extensive editing of a short piece--let's eliminate that whole section, and now move the bottom to the top and the top to the middle and write a new bottom and it turns out that the core metaphor wasn't this but was really that, so there are sixteen sentences dotted here and there to twist around--tends to happen when the first draft--of the short piece--is done. - I have yet to finish even a first draft of a book-length anything, but as I try to keep gnawing on Tulips and Butter, each scene is being treated like a short piece. There will no doubt be an editing phase above that. I'm curious to find out what that's going to be. If it turns out that this totally disagrees with anything I said earlier in the thread, that'll be interesting too.
And yet many people are able to edit as they go. So "quite impossible" doesn't seem quite right... unless we accept that writing a story isn't really all that much like baking a cake...
'Each word weighed with the care of a goldsmith.' On the radio right now - talking about Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee
As weird as it may be, I just write in a simple text document. When it comes to posting the work online (Forums, or any other sites) That's where i edit it.
Maybe the cake analogy works if we assume making small adjustment while baking ("ah shit, I added too much water/milk/oil, better pour in more flour") is spot editing, while decorating is the final polish. These analogies always fall apart pretty quickly when we try to take them literally, though, to be fair. It's almost as if things aren't really that much like other things at all!
And yet as writers it seems we constantly feel the need to speak in metaphors about the writing process rather than just saying what we mean
When you got the juices flowing, i write....you have a scene in your head, i just need to get this down on the computer...i do little edits as i go along, but i try not to stop my flow.. You come back to it later and i may change a few things, the principal structure is still there. My first chapter, of my first book has changed more than half a dozen times. you come back to it, read it and tweek it. I read once, that a good author is never fully happy with his work.. he will allways want to go back and fiddle with it..i do not know how true that is.. My method is, write the basic story of the novel, the first draft. then come back to it, flesh it out if need be and general read through edit etc.. you may read through it a few times to make sure of it reads okay. there is no errors, or continuity problems.. One thing that puts me of a novel, is when there is continuity issues....
