I never edit until after I have revised. Editing as you go slows you down and risks wasted effort if you delete or change what you edited. Editing should be the last step.
Hi @joe sixpak , how do you differentiate between editing and revision? Forgive my ignorance, I've always thought the two went hand in hand.
They are related. They are sort of hand holding. But they are different. There are 5 levels of editing. I consider true editing to be the lowest level and the revision to be the middle levels, whilst planning and organising are the highest level aka developmental editing. After you plan and organise to have a map to writing the first draft, you just write write write until you have it done. You do not stop to edit or revise while you go. You do not worry about polishing anything. Don't worry about SPAG or flow or characters. Just get the whole thing done per the roadmap you had planned. Then you ignore it for a week or two. After that you read it all the way through carefully while doing nothing; then read it again. Make notes about flow, plot, character, etc. Then start rewriting and revising. Revising is checking for the flow, the holes to fill , and the stuff that you need to take out because it is not helpful or even detracts; and then cutting pasting, deleting, rewriting, until you have a good draft. You may need to repeat if your name isnt Rowling or Patterson The next step in revising is at a higher level. Fix up the characters, maybe improve the plot , and otherwise polish the mss. Finally comes the true editing for SPAG and final clean up of the mss.
I do both. I draft, re-draft and re-draft repeatedly. Go away for a week, come back with fresh eyes; do it again. Once there's a first draft complete, do a full edit. Get some alpha readers, then edit, then beta readers, then edit again. Print it off and edit it again on paper because it feels different and you spot different things. Writing is a *lot* of work.
That's a great process for some people, but you've gotta admit it's not universal practice. I can't not edit as I go, and if I have to wait between drafts to come back with fresh eyes, if I'm not allowed to touch something I just wrote, I lose interest entirely. Often those breaks happen anyway, but I can't force them if I know how I want to improve something already, and you should never cut yourself off when you're in a good editing mindset, just as you shouldn't cut yourself off when you're in a good first draft writing mindset. I have a very different workflow and I'd argue from results that it's great for me. So I'd watch out for telling everyone that what works for you is the only way or the right way to do it. (Also, even if your name is Rowling or whatever, you still have to edit multiple drafts. Great authors are great because they edit a lot, not because their every word comes out perfect. Rowling herself talked about how she had to make major revisions just before release of one Harry Potter book that she realised she'd left with a huge plot hole. That's just one example of the amount of editing and revision that goes into just about every author's work.)
Some people are OCD about editing while they go. What is the point. Chances are it could be deleted or at least revised which would waste that effort. And it slows your momentum. Once you are writing imho you should keep writing and not worry about editing until the draft is done. Then read the whole draft and revise before you edit anything. It saves waste and rework and does not destroy momentum. You can do what ever works for you. I will tell people what is the optimal process and why. Tell me what gain there is to stopping writing and start editing a partial mss that may be completely discarded or heavily rewritten thus requiring rework of the editing. And no matter what your name is , it is far easier to edit when the draft is structured correctly first. Fill the holes and cut the excess before wasting time editing. And if you do it right (again imho the correct process for efficiency and speed) you revise a rough draft once. You edit that draft once. And you may polish that in turn; but you dont keep editing endless drafts unless you like busywork. Even Rowling could miss a plot hole if she jumped into editing before finishing the draft and doing that first review to ensure the structure was right.
I'd argue that any time spent thinking and reading critically isn't wasted, because it's steadily increasing your ability to edit effectively. Sure, the specific work you did might be erased, but the experience of doing it isn't.
Okay, talking about what's "optimal" for everybody is just presumptuous. And calling someone else's workflow "OCD" is rude, and shows that you're not interested in understanding how and why individuals can approach things differently. I could list the ways your process seems stupid to me, but I recognise that people are different and what makes sense to us is different, so I don't assume that you're doing it wrong or that it's in any way stupid outside of my own frame of reference. I explained in my own answer here that editing is part of writing for me. I write a sentence, I look at how it fits in with the previous one, sometimes I notice a way they could work together better and I make a minor alteration, adding a microsecond to my writing time and subtracting the microsecond when I would have to catch it later. But I don't consider it writing -- in my case, it's just not -- if I'm just hitting keys and leaving the results of each one on the screen; for me, writing is a process of constructing sentences on the page, which sometimes means using the backspace key to try out different arrangements. My current paragraph might make me think of a different way to word something a few paragraphs back, and it would be ridiculously counter-productive of me to bury that instinct and forget about the improvement that just occurred to me. That's not an interruption to momentum, that's continuing the momentum in a way that makes the piece I'm writing better and better, and eliminates work that would have to come later. It would break momentum for writers like me to have to do all our editing separately. If I later cut the whole paragraph... well, if I worried about that, there wouldn't be much point writing it at all in the first place. Even if it all changes later, the time's not wasted if you're improving what you had, if you're writing better and better sentences all the time. Even if you write great things that you have to cut, you're practising your craft and becoming a better writer. "Waste" is the wrong way to think about it. You're talking about efficiency, and I get that, but there's a huge inefficiency in not taking advantage of editing impulses and trying to force writing impulses instead. If you think every writer on the planet can apply one method and get the best results out of it, you're just demonstrably wrong.
I didnt say what was optimal for everybody. I said what was optimal based on process engineering. Do you have a better descriptor for interrupting forward progress to go back and edit something that may be deleted. OCD seemed accurate to me. I do know why people do things differently. But there can only be one way that is best. So logically everything else would be sub optimal. I am always eager to learn and improve. Please do tell me why my process is not good. I know editing is part of your writing for you . I am positing that if you changed your process you could be more productive. And the time to find the best arrangement of words is not while you are getting the story down the first time. Far better to do that after revising when you are getting to the editing and polishing of an mss that is correctly structured. I have to disagree. Giving in to impulses that block forward progress and is often wasted effort is the epitome of inefficiency. Have you ever tried writing first. Then revising. And lastly tweaking instead of doing that contemporaneously? I understand if your MTBI is not amenable to doing that naturally. But if you tried I would guarantee you could be more productive.
Experience does not write novels. You can get just as much experience by editing last when it won't be wasted motion.
Nah. I fundamentally disagree with that. Experience is a huge component in writing good novels - maybe you're not taking quality into account?
It's apparent to me that you're seriously not understanding this, so I'll try to explain point by point. Okay, let me explain it in process engineering terms. You design a process based on a given situation, the tools you're using, the product you're creating. One size will not fit all. One method cannot be "optimal" for every situation: to optimise anything, you need to specifically consider a given scenario. The same process cannot give you the same results in every single case, unless every case is somehow exactly the same, therefore that's not optimisation at all. It's not interrupting forward progress unless you're thinking in confusedly linear terms. Improving the whole piece you're writing is forward progress, whichever part you start with. OCD is dysfunctional. If editing as you go is a fluid process which does not disturb your momentum and which has good results for you, it's not a dysfunction. It depends on the individual: some people will just hold themselves up and kill the writing momentum, others will be able to write more because they like to work in this mode. That's idiosyncrasy, not dysfunction. Clearly you don't, as I explained in my previous post and as I'm suggesting here. You know that people do things differently, and you can think of reasons that they would do things "wrong", but you don't seem to understand that some people do things in different ways because it helps them achieve an equally good or superior result. For the individual. For a given project. There will be one best way to do every individual thing, but not one best way for everyone to do everything. I think this is the source of your confusion. You're trying to simplify the concept by taking the strongest generalisation about what works and making it actually universal, when it can't be. It's not "not good" though, that's my point. Even though it would be stupid for me, it works for you. It's probably the best way for you to do it, and for several other people, too. But trying to tailor one method that will be optimal for everyone is just not understanding how processes are designed for purpose, to fit different situations, including the different cognitive software everyone is using. I would not be more productive. I am not merely positing that, I am explaining that. I've tried different writing processes and I've perfected a process that works specifically for me. If you can't see how this is presumptuous of you, you need to seriously reflect on this before you come across someone less polite than me and tell them this groundlessly that they don't know what they're doing. No. Simply no. You can improve the arrangement of words later, but for some people, writing itself is the attempt to get it right when you start. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just a different way of doing it. There are benefits to doing it both ways: if I nail the way I want a sentence to flow, it can guide what follows. It can set the voice that I try to continue with each following sentence, and then save a whole passage from having to be completely rewritten to make it work better. Besides, if I leave it obviously clunky, the whole thought process can become jumbled and clunky, I might become confused about the idea behind it. These are just some reasons that some people will find methods like mine a better use of their time, based on what the process of writing is for them. Again, forward progress need not mean that you're only working on the "last" bit of your story at a time. Forward progress can be improvement anywhere in the work, based on how you approach it in stages. If I have a great idea for improving a previous line, I'm not halting progress to make that improvement. I'm moving forward towards the final product. Yes, I have. It doesn't work for me. As I already explained, it interrupts my workflow and frustrates me. It bores me with my own work. It leaves mistakes in that make more work for me to clean up later. It wastes my time, because I know how I could be working faster, according to my own method. These two statements are basically contradictory. If you know that your method doesn't come as naturally to people with different mentalities, you cannot guarantee that your method will improve my productivity. Other methods will tend to suit people who think about things and work through things in different ways. Learning to apply this method might help some people, but as in my case, it simply might not. I know what's more productive for me, what habits allow me to prevent more mistakes and keep them from accumulating, to think clearer and more creatively, to stay in a constructive mindset, to improve my drafts faster and to ultimately come up with better writing. This is where your misunderstanding of others becomes actually presumptuous and insulting.
"There can only be one way that is best" would only have any hope of making sense if you can always use the same equipment for a process and if the process is always intended to create the same product. But that's absolutely not true for writing books. Writing books is not really a "process" in the first place, not in the same sense that making steel or tomato ketchup is a process. It's a design process. Design is fundamentally different from manufacturing. Design comes up with a different product each time, and you don't know precisely what that product will be until you've finished the design. And you can't use the same equipment for every book, because the equipment is the human being writing the book. So, no, it doesn't make any sense at all to claim that there's a single best process. And, yes, you might quite often edit something that may be deleted in the end. The editing clarifies that item, and that clarification may end up meaning that the item may need to be deleted. It's like the advice for pruning trees that I've often read--you prune here, and there, and evaluate the shape that you've created, and with the information from the simpler and clearer shape, you may well discover that a large branch that has received several "editing" cuts actually needs to go entirely. The only way to know the very fastest way to prune a tree is to prune it, study the motions that you made, and then go back in time and prune it again, skipping the unneeded motions. But you don't have a time machine, and the next tree is very different. The only way to know the very fastest way to write a book is to write it, memorize the text, and then go back in time and type it all in. But you don't have a time machine, and the next book is very different.
I've usually been one to complete the first draft before doing any editing at all, but in my current project - a police procedural with a major subplot that has nothing to do with the crime aspect - I found I couldn't work that way. As various nuances occurred to me, I found I had to go back and make plot corrections and alter timelines to make the whole thing work. I've now completed the first draft and am beginning the review-and-edit process. Even those who edit as they go will need to go through their ms and edit before considering it completed, especially if one plans to seek publication.
May not make sense to you, but there is a reason businesses have best practices and there are building codes as well as other constraints too.
And I'll bet that you wait for a tree to be a 50-foot oak before you prune it for the first time, right? Who cares that the tree might have been healthier and more graceful if it had been tended all along--just read to it from a book on best practices and all will be well. Edited to modify, because I interpreted "building codes" as...I'm not sure what. Building codes have nothing to do with commanding the building's designer to create the design in a certain order without going back and rethinking. Nothing at all. My conclusion remains: You seem to be utterly unable to understand the distinction between design and manufacturing.
Sorry but the govt mandates CMMI for their contractors to guide the design process. They did that because letting them pants a solution took too long and cost too much money and resulted in lower quality.
Well, as a former housing and health inspector, I would regard building codes as a sort of ultimate reality check. The architect is free to design around certain parameters that are agreed to be necessary parts of the design, usually as a result of shortcomings in previous designs. And, contrary to what Chickenfreak said, the codes happen before the design exists, because elements of the design depend on the requirements of the code. True, a preliminary design can exist on paper without conforming to the codes, but no sane architect would prepare a blueprint without consulting the codes. What has this to do with editing? Only that the first draft is the preliminary design, whereas the one that you hand over to the editor has to be a more finished product, I'd think.
We are debating whether you design and then write. Writing first is building without plan or blueprint and hoping it would make code. I do not consider a first draft that was pantsed to be a design at all. It is brainstorming so you can design the building you want and then build that design to code.
I corrected that; I'm guessing that you're responding to the pre-correction version of my post. I somehow got "building codes" and "manufacturing process" all mixed up in my head. Building codes provide parameters to the design process, but they don't prescribe that process.
True. Codes dont prescribe process. But often the buyer does to make sure the product is good. ISO 9000 and many other standards exist to ensure a good process not dictate the details of it. USA govt demands CMMI compliance if you expect to work for them building anything. We certify doctors and engineers to ensure that their work is done in an accepted manner. Would you really pick a doctor who was pantsing a cure for your ailment?
