Thoughts on editing

You know, it might seem like a trivial point, but people who write books on writing seem to regard editing as some magical process that just happens. After all, once you've written a whole novel, how hard can it be to draft it?

Well, it turns out it can be pretty hard. Because you have to reread your work, which can be unpleasant at the best of times. Of course you'll come across sections where you think "Oh, the cleverness of me!", but for the most part, it will be cringeworthy. Because, apparently, as all the books tell me, the first draft of every novel ever written was bad. I don't believe them. There's no way it could be as bad as mine.

At some point I need to post up a list of useful resources on writing, for myself as much as anyone else (I always forget what that website was called, or whether that book was any good). One that would be up there is the NaNoWriMo website, specifically for its pep talks. They are almost exclusively on writing the novel rather than editing it, but Katharine Paterson's one mentions editing, comparing it to smoothing and carving mined granite (from a speech prepared for schoolkids in a town with a granite-mining industry, so it was a metaphor they understood). At the time I thought it was a fairly obvious way of expressing the idea, but after spending yesterday evening editing, I think I understand it a lot better. Paterson actually provides a useful paradigm for considering the difficulties of editing.

See, I think what defeats me in editing (and I do avoid it where possible, where it used to be my favourite part of the process) is that nobody mentions that once you've got your words down on paper, that's just the first part of the slog. The writing itself is horribly difficult at times, but taking part in something like NaNoWriMo can really help. That's just false economy, though: when you've done the mad rush of NaNo, you've wept and laughed and banged your head on the desk, and you've been lucky or detemined enough to make it to 50,000 words, you're ready to dive right into editing. The site (and many participants) advise against doing that, as leaving it to stew for a couple of months is always good. However, if you're anything like me, when you've left it for a couple of months and are ready and raring to edit, you fish the manuscript out from its drawer, open it up, red pen at the ready and...promptly become disheartened. Because all that time you saved in NaNo by shutting off your inner editor and letting the words flow as they would, all those hours just pressing on, not caring if what you wrote was rubbish, the race to get finished - all that means that editing takes twice as long, because you have to do a draft just to make it readable first.

I think NaNo is a great thing and I certainly wouldn't have one of my now favourite stories around if I hadn't taken part, but trying to edit it is like chipping slowly away at an ugly, rough bit of granite. You have to trust that there's a shape in there to be found, and chip away at the parts until you find it. It's horrible, tough work, and you have to cut off promising bits of stone and sometimes you have to just close your eyes and make a drastic change, risking ruining it completely on the offchance you'll make it better. Then comes the smoothing and the prettifying, but if you've not been sketching out the shape as you go along, you'll have a lot more work to do come the editing phase. Luckily for us writers as opposed to stone cutters, we have a nice handy 'undo' button if everything goes wrong, like the equivalent of being able to rewind time and stick a bit of stone back on. But, if you keep on chipping away, even if there doesn't seem to be a beautiful statue inside this rough bit of stone, you eventually start to see the curves, and maybe they'll build up to something beautiful. I suppose we just all have to trust to our skill that we can effectively make art from a block of stone.