I just write my story without looking back at all. I have a good memory so I get down all the good little details and all that. At the end of my story I wait a few days (maybe weeks) and go back and edit, revise, get things in there that I should have had. I will write a chapter then go back and scan for any mistakes that are big, but I don't correct every last thing or make things look cleaner. My feeling is that if I get the whole thing done, I'll feel ten times more obligated to go back and polish my work. It usually works fairly well
Yeah, I think that's a perfectly valid way to go about editing a piece. I've heard it suggested that putting it aside and coming back weeks later is a good way to have a fresh mind when it's time to revise your own work. My method is to just edit when I don't feel inspired to write, which isn't that great if I'm running into lots of mistakes.
You see, this happens to me in a sort. Whenever I look back at my work, I have a lot of corrections to make and a lot of things to change. It seems to almost make me feel crappy about my writing and that the story can't go anywhere. That's exactly why I completely dropped that style. Even the gods of writing had to go back and say "Wow, this sucks." from time to time.
Whatever works for you. We're all different and for me, I would rather get a complete first draft down then edit heavily afterwards which is why I found NaNoWriMo so beneficial.
Unless I was publishing something as a serial, I'd always write the entire thing before starting to edit. It's more efficient. No matter how much you go through and revise the first half of your story, you're still going to have to go through it again once you've written the second to ensure there aren't any contradictions or anything between them. Plus, there are something larger scale edits (for example, removing unneeded scenes when your story turns out longer than intended, or changing a subplot that didn't quite fit with how the climax turned out) that you can't effectively do when you've only written the first chapter, so you risk wasting that time you spent editing before you'd finished writing!
True enough in a lot of ways, but I learn from the editing process and I'm more confident in my writing after I've taken a good long while to ensure that I'm happy with it. It may be a sacrifice in efficiency, but at least for the time being it gives me a psychological edge knowing that the last time I touched my third chapter wasn't four months ago.
love the idea of the editing process, I was in the blank mode and I couldn't figure out where to go with any of my writing until I came across this at 3am. I had no idea that other people had the same things going on. I had no clue as to polish anything.
I definitely wait to edit until the story isn't fresh in my mind. I have this cool thing happen where it no longer feels like *my* writing so I can be more clear-minded about what needs to be edited. I look at it and I'm like..wait, that doesn't work! So yeah.
it's certainly no sin... and many writers work like that, so if it's no problem for you, just keep doing whatever works for you and don't worry about what anyone else does...
