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And Lines to Go before I Sleep*


Editing requires close reading of the material at hand, and when you’ve read over your own work umpteen times while writing it, you think you know what it says. In order to then be able to self-edit your work, you’ve got to get a more distant perspective. To do that, you first need to train yourself to be an objective reader. And to do that, you practice editing other people’s writing.


Snowy Woodland

"Snowy Woodland" - WIX Stock Photo

No, you don’t have to worry about taking on a new profession to practice this; there are plenty of already published works available for you to practice upon. Creative works, such as novels and poems, offer ample opportunities for you to analyze and revise. Check out your own bookshelves, the library, or browse the Internet for choice materials.

The Internet is a particularly rich mine for source material — you can find fiction and poetry forums, a multitude of blogs on just as many subjects, and websites galore that still seem to need editing, despite their pretense of professional presentation.

Give it a whirl. Surf the web and find a poem you think is a bit rough, or a few paragraphs of a short story or article, and copy the material to a blank page in your word processor.

The next step is to read slowly, carefully. Are there any obvious mistakes that weren’t caught before the piece was published? What about awkward passages? Parse each line or sentence and ask yourself, even if the existing section is “fine,” what you would do differently if you had written the piece?

The point of such an exercise is to free yourself of ownership of a work so you have a chance to see what it feels like to dissect and/or revise work that doesn’t involve your ego. If you’re a person who has a hard time separating yourself from the work you do, it’s much easier for you to learn how to analyze and be impersonally discerning over writing you have no ties to.

Practice this with others’ works, and then, when it feels comfortable and natural to you, try it on your own poem or piece of prose. You can even try pretending your work is someone else’s so that you can approach it the same way you approached the other unfamiliar works.

Robin D. Gill, author of A Dolphin in the Woods (Paraverse Press, 2009), in the section about “types of paraversing” that concerns reworking [someone else’s] poem, says, “We can often edit others better than themselves. Perhaps that is why we may rise above ourselves to improve another’s work.”

I heartily agree. But also, the more you edit any works from an objective viewpoint, the easier the task becomes when it’s time to be critical (and fair) about your own work.

Here’s a bonus:

Sometimes when we exercise by “reworking” another’s elegant prose piece (perhaps something about nature) and distill it through thorough editing, we can turn it into a poem of our own. Yet another significant reason to play about with someone else’s work, right? Just be sure to remember poet Ezra Pound's advice to "make it new."

*The title is a paraverse of Robert Frost’s final line of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

And miles to go before I sleep.

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