On Editing

I knew self-editing would be hard. Don’t get me wrong—I work my ass off when I edit other people’s work, and I expected to have to work even harder on my own, considering I have the final say on everything.

I’ve never truly self-edited before. I didn’t really know how; the editing was always done on a sentence level, not the whole “does each sentence contribute to the rest of the story?” type of editing. Where you have to question each phrase and see if it contributes, if it does its job, or if it’s just tagging along for the ride. Because that’s what first drafts seem to be filled with: free loaders, just there to weigh the ride down and make it harder and longer to get to the end.

But sadly, the free loaders aren’t the problem, not even the half-good sentences that need to be polished, the real problem arises when the sentence is perfect. I use the word loosely here, and don’t really believe that anything I write is perfect. But I’m referring to a sentence that does its dual job, of being a sentence and carrying the rest of the story along, but you still spend more time looking at it and trying to make it better than you spend on the bad sentences. These moments are the perfect pause in the work for doubt to manifest itself.

It’s these instances when I wonder if I’m too tired to be working right then, if I’m going too easy on myself, if I still don’t know what I’m doing, if the rest of my 98,000 words are even worth it. This is when I put down the pen and pull out the highlighter and highlight the sentence, telling myself to go back to it or get a second opinion on it. But this happens more and more often now, and again I don’t know if it’s because I’m losing the momentum I started out with or if I had gained the momentum when I was writing these down, and the highlighted paragraphs are not, in fact, proof that I don’t know what I’m doing, but that I do.

What I need is a recording of the words “it’s fine, keep it.” So I can hit a button every time I get to one of these moments of doubt and just follow that advice and leave it. I will, in time come back to it, and when I do all that I’ll have accomplished is making the doubt return as I return to the highlighted sections. So the highlighter will be used more sparingly, if at all.

These positive thought work great in theory, and though I tell myself “it’s fine, keep it,” the doubt is still there, because I’m telling myself that it’s good, which, in my twisted mind, probably means it’s not.

I know the first sections of the story aren’t as good because I spent too much time obsessing over the language, and stretching every scene out just out of a fascination with watching the word count go up and up. 

So I know it’ll get easier as the story progresses, I just wish I could leave the good sentences be and spend more energy on the ones that need improving, and even more on the ones that need kicking out.