How about now and later?
Sometimes writers forget that editing is about writing. If you remember to think about it that way, though, editing is revealed to be not so much the removed-from-the-process sort of act as some seem to dread, but rather, part of the creative process.
There’s a lot of advice out there that says, “Leave the editing until after the writing is done.” If you’re extremely self-critical and tangle yourself up with indecision, that’s fairly sane counsel. You’ll get the flow down on paper (or onscreen), and ensure you at least finish something halfway reasonable, as far as concrete plot or poem or entertainment or instruction goes. When you write without stopping to edit at intervals, though, it really does mean that you have “skipped over” a lot of details that your logical, discriminating mind, at a slower, more analytical, and observant pace, would have reordered. Or eliminated. Or added to.
If you’re the kind of writer who can switch gears after a stream-of-consciousness first draft and then revise and edit like a calm, precise surgeon on subsequent drafts, then this method of polishing your writing is absolutely viable.
But let’s say you’re not. Instead, once you get to your decided “end,” you are attached to everything you wrote in the first go. You poured your creative blood into the initial work and it felt awesome. You think that maybe you might have only made a few typos, and going back to revise at any length, and then copyedit after that, is really too much terrorizing work to consider.
It’s my opinion that if you are one of these writers who emotionally suffer from the thought of needing to edit (or be edited), you are better off developing self-editing techniques that can be applied at shorter intervals, rather than waiting until you’ve deemed a work “completed.”
If revision happens during the writing, it is part of the writing. If you notice something is wrong while you are in the process of getting the words out, make a quick mental note to come back to it as soon as you have finished typing out your speeding thoughts (or even type it into a parenthetical aside within the manuscript, formatting the text in color, if helpful, right when you think about it so that you can find it again later, easily — and delete after your fix). If you’ve a torrent of ideas still flooding onto your keyboard, allow yourself to continue to write a few paragraphs, or even a chapter, before heading back to the spot that grabbed your attention. Perhaps something nagged at you in the background until you realized it needed your attention. Whatever the case, it’s far better to attend to the issue while in a creative state, than to forget about it until (and if) you run into it again only after having written an entire book or article.
Poems, by their brief nature — unless epic — may be another matter, probably deserving a complete draft before revision commences; however, I have heard more than one story from mouths of poets who admit they may write only one or two lines at a time before commencing to revise and edit. Poet Jean Burden comes to mind.
Words, lines, sentences…paragraphs, passages, chapters…are malleable. When you change them should be a matter of temperament, when it comes to critical thinking.
Will doing all of your revision or self-editing during the initial writing process be enough to produce a clear, clean manuscript? Probably not completely — none of us are perfect, and we all can use some objective input from others — and yes, a cooling-off period after the first draft is done, with follow-up rounds of copyediting, is still recommended even for those who accomplish most of their own revisions in serial fashion.
Still, if you are always waiting to revise and edit until the first draft has been written in whole, consider whether you do so because the advice to proceed in that fashion has been prevalent for decades, or because you really can’t seem to fashion any piece of writing unless you first avoid analysis of the process altogether.
Also ask yourself, do you resist or fear editing because you’re not really sure how to go about it? Many writers come to realize they don’t really know how to professionally revise or self-edit. If this is the case for you, I invite you to come by my blog regularly for more upcoming tips and techniques — both from me, and from my literary guests.
Come by even if you’re totally comfortable with self-editing — I’d love to hear your comments about how you go about it.