In Which Editing Is Skewered But Refuses To Die

I hate editing.

What a shock, I know, right? After years of being smacked in the face with the rule no one is above revision, not to mention being asked to read over other people's writing and render judgments (which is its own kind of squirrelly) I have come to the conclusion that what I hate most about editing and revising is that it's effort. It's work, and it's hard work, and it's a pain in the ass. Not only is it effort, it's soul-crushing, sometimes repetitive, often ego-shredding effort that leaves you limp and sweaty and not in the fun way, wondering why you ever thought you could do this or bothered to try in the first place. I hate it.

Writing is effort too, but it's a much more accustomed effort for me; I've been writing for at least 25 years so it bloody well should be!  It's also a hell of a lot more fun. It's creating, it's storytelling, it's sharing all those cool ideas with the rest of the world. Look, I had this idea and then I did this thing, isn't it cool? Chances are, no matter how terrifying it is to actually put it in front of real eyeballs that aren't yours, you still feel that element of bouncing around going look what I did. Editing is ripping all that apart again, and even if you put it all back together and it's much more better afterwards, you still have to do the ripping. It hurts. A lot.

So, that's the biggest chunk of the effort. It starts with tearing your own work to pieces, which then makes it easy to succumb to the brainweasels, and fighting them is an uphill battle with boulders strapped to your arms. If you don't know what brainweasels are, they're the little jackasses that crawl into your head and make their little weaselly nests and whisper that you suck, that you're not worth it, this isn't worth it when everyone's going to hate it or, worse, ignore you. Brainweasels come in all shapes and sizes, speak all languages, and swarm around any small accomplishment that you manage because they hate success. Of course you'll fight them, and you'll push through it and get your work edited and rewritten, and you might even manage not to cut or change anything that didn't need to be cut or changed before the brainweasels got to you, but it's freaking exhausting work. Like I said, much more effort for a much less cool reward.

I didn't start editing my own work till I was in my early twenties, when I realized that maybe not everything that came out of my fingertips was pure gold. Yes, I was that arrogant bitch. At least in private. And then when I started editing my work, I was hard on myself. Maybe harder than I needed to be. My pages were covered in red ink, maybe a third of the sentences were left untouched if that many, and there were large swaths of writing involving phrases like "the hell is this?" and "this is clumsy, redo." Sometimes I'd take a wild hair and go on a tangent, scribbling down the margins at an ever increasing angle until it was almost illegible and going down ninety degrees from how it started. And it wasn't good odds that when I went back I'd remember what the hell I was talking about, so that's twice the effort for half the end result. Paragraphs got cut. Scenes got cut. If anyone reading this has suffered through my reviewing and revising their work, be assured, I'm just as hard on myself.

So, that happened, and then I stopped editing again because why bother. And I stopped pushing myself within my writing because why bother. And eventually I just stopped trying. To write, to do much of anything.

The reasons I started up again are complex and require far too much backstory. I did pick it up again, I got better at writing, and my best friend got better at editing which made for an ideal pair.  90% of the time she knows, just from knowing me, what I'm going for and is able to pull out some alternate phrasings. Apart from that and other aspects having to do with knowing each other for 10ish years, we communicate back and forth a lot when we're working on a project. I give her the specs, deadline and word count and rough themes, and then I go write. When I'm done, I toss her the draft, she marks it up in one color and tosses it back to me. I mark it up and fix what she's noted, add in some notes of my own and toss it back at her for review. If the changes work, she strips out our notes and leaves in only the ones that still apply. Plus new ones for whatever I broke trying to fix things. Throughout all this, we IM or email if there's a question on a note or a piece of prose. And it works, not just because we clarify with each other what we mean if things are murky, but because she trusts that I'll listen to her edits and I trust that she's trying to help and make my work better, not tear it down. And that she has the detachment I can't manage.

Editing is a pain in the ass. And there's no getting around it. I've made major edits to this blog entry at least twice already. Nothing comes out a hundred percent the first time; it takes an amazing amount of luck to even get it eighty percent the first time. But there are things you can do to make it easier. Find a first reader, or a couple of them, who you trust not only to read you and get what you're trying to say, but also who you trust to be both fair and gentle enough to tell you the things you don't want to hear in the way you're most likely to hear them. Don't do it all at once, do a couple pages or a few hundred words and take a break, get up, get a glass of water, stretch, reset your brain a bit. Treat yourself kindly while you edit, fix yourself regular healthy meals, small desserts or other kinds of treats to keep your spirits up, stay hydrated, get plenty of sleep. Mind your medications, if you're on them. And while you're editing, try and keep in some kind of contact with the elements of your work that you loved in the first place. Because you're going to get so deep into your work's flaws that you're going to come to hate it, and you'll need to remember why you tried in the first place.

It'll come out better in the end, though. Editing, for all the jokes about pages bleeding ink, isn't about tearing down, it's about building it up more solid and more beautiful than it started. It's just a matter of putting forth the effort to get there.