I usually do three or four drafts before I edit. I find the first few drafts it works best for me to send the story to one or two close beta readers who understand my style, and enjoy the genre. They tell me where they struggle, mark down suggestions that I may or may not take, and I make updates from there. Rinse and repeat until we both feel it's come to a good spot. Then I will read it with a very critical eye and do my own edits. I look at the beta readers as my rough grit, and then I go over it with some fine grit just to polish it up. My current short story WIP "Momma" is in that last stage right now. I'm hopeful I'll have a submission ready piece by this weekend.
I have heard of people who edit as they go, and I myself will sometimes go back and change a word or a punctuation mark from time to time. But for me, the biggest problem is turning off the goddamn editor and concentrating on the flow of the piece. Otherwise, I'd be dinking forever with the last paragraph I wrote, and never proceed to the next one. I tell myself that creativity happens when it happens, and can't be denied when it happens, whereas editing can always be saved for later.
I edit as I go, then I'll also redraft or even rethink things once I have a bunch written out. While I am still trying to progress from being an "okay" writer, to a "good" one, I find that I have to do lots of edits and don't want to have a hundred pages of crap that I have to work through or even toss. I'd rather hone my skills now, and I've been through the process of writing garbage enough to know where my major mistakes are. I'll get ten pages in, then go back through it and see how it really reads before continuing. I'll see the stuff I messed up and see a bad pattern and say "I've been down this road before, better back up". Of course, you do have to write hundreds of pages of awfulness before you can start catching yourself like that. Practice really does help, and it seems weird, but it's best to make mistakes and have written stuff that's terrible. Eventually you'll start recognizing it, and getting stuff down on paper is good, even if it's badly written or has lots of errors. It's still practice, and you will learn from it over enough time. No one can sit down the first time and write a perfect book without first having written a few bad ones. Even the most prized authors have a stack of shit they keep locked in a drawer and never will let it see the light of day...or they burned it, one of the two. haha
I edit as I go. I hate editing, and the idea of having to go back over a whole novel's worth of words at one time makes me VERY unhappy. So I make most changes as I go.
Yeah editing on the go is better than in one giant mass. Though I usually do this while rereading to keep the continuity straight and true, and make sure their is no accidental deus ex machina moments popping up. Though even just a reread is a good idea to catch mistakes, that would otherwise get over looked. Mainly missing words, or doubled words, and small stuff like that.
I'm kind of a hybrid, for the most part. I don't spew garbage onto the page--rather, I think about what I'm going to write before and as I'm writing it. If I'm not happy with it, I'll make some changes. But I won't dally for too long. Obvious problems will get corrected, weird passages will get ironed out, but if I sense that it'll take a lot of effort, I'm better off just marking it, moving on, and coming back to it later. Losing forward momentum destroys my productivity.
I'm planning on doing that. I decided to scrap my current draft and start over again, so I'm going to edit it chapter by chapter while I'm at it.
I used to edit as I went, but it just makes me very critical of what I'm writing as I go and makes me not want to write at all (since nothing's ever good enough for my editor brain). So I'm learning how to shut that down and just focus on writing, and edit later, because it makes me much more productive.
I edit as I go, and when I say "edit" I don't just mean chapter-by-chapter. I mean paragraph-by-paragraph and sentence-by-sentence. I edit as I go until my stuff sounds good to me when I read it aloud. I like to read my current WIP aloud in the tone of a grandfather relating legends to his grandchildren around a campfire, so my narrator has a personality. This changes the way I write. I write with both my narrator and his audience in mind. Once my first draft is done, I go over it to correct all the wrong turns (I make lots of wrong turns because I'm a pantser), and that allows me to carry on the pleasure of narration. I love writing.
both. sometimes i'm like "screw it, let's plow through this," and other times i can't seem to find a rhythm because i can't see beyond all the stupid i manage to eject on to one page. i try to find a balance between the two. kind of like doing some of my dishes while i'm cooking as opposed to letting them pile up until the very end. both work, but it depends on my state of mind.
I'm pretty sure Tolkien was a pantser, so you're in good company. I'm sort of a semi-pantser, I guess. I start out with a skeleton and I just pants the middle bits.
I usually brain dump then edit. In shorter compositions, my editing often reveals I have a bad habit of placing first what needs to come last.
I edit later. First drafts are my prototype, and it's the draft where I explore, discover and have fun with. It's basically the playground for my creative brain.
I've heard it said once or twice that writing is creating and editing is destroying; don't try and mix the two. I'm in that camp myself, as I find editing on the go to be swapping back and forth between two different hats. But it seems to work for a lot of people, and if they swear by it, then it must work! I'd personally never get passed a paragraph if I was trying to make it perfect while I wrote it. I'd rather have a huge 130k word lump of garbage to work with rather than 10k words of perfection. I think another thread addressed this topic, and some super wise person said something along the lines of "writing is like cooking--you need a few ingredients first before you can make them into something worth eating". I really liked that. But I think every person has their own way of doing it, and you should use the one that gets you the results you're looking for!
I brain dump, then edit each chapter before moving onto the next. Then edit the whole thing again once the manuscript is complete.
Yeah, there is no right or wrong way. I think it's really about comfort or predilection. I had tried editing as you go, but my brain just hates it. Same with following an outline, my brain just can't move on. I found that you don't choose a writing process, the writing process chooses you. (that is the cheesiest crap I've written.)
If there's a glaring need to edit immediately then I do so but otherwise I just dump everything out then go back on completion and edit a number of times. There's nothing like killing a writing flow like editing every second sentence you write.
I probably reconsider and fiddle with at least every second line before moving onto the next one. I tend to take a "two steps forward, one step back" approach of revisiting and improving the previous lines as I move ahead. Doesn't mean you don't have to go back with fresh eyes and edit the completed draft later, but I find this way I do a lot of proof-reading and end up with a first draft that's at least polished enough that I'm excited to make it even better rather than discouraged that it's so full of simple problems. This is just my natural mode, so I do the same thing when I post to forums. (Some of these lines have been through a couple iterations, for example.) I think of it as basic courtesy to make sure that what I've just written makes sense to the reader before submitting it for anyone, and the same way, I want to make sure that my first draft is going to meet my own basic standards. It's definitely a personal idiosyncrasy, but I just love the perfectibility of the written word and editing makes me happy. For me it doesn't break the flow, it's part of the flow. I couldn't keep myself from doing it.
I'll usually write the thing, finish it, read it out loud, and change whatever sounds unnatural. Sometimes I'll read it with a silly accent if the work calls for it. As of late, it often does.
Yep, I'm in the same camp as truthbeckons and the dapper-hatted minstrel. Edit as I go or I don't sleep. I've been obssessing a little over being so obsessive (and I'm only like this with writing - so slack in other areas), so finding company is rather lovely .
I work by handwriting a scene or chapter (because for me writing by hand flows more naturally than typing) and then type it up. So as a result of the way I work, I do at least some of my editing as I go. I also plan a lot in order to reduce the amount of editing needed. I don't like editing very much.
