Thursday
Feb162012
I'll never say: "I used to write."
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 11:37AM
Editing is worse than Writing. That’s where the true battle comes in. I took seven days off last month to work on the novel. I was hoping to complete it, but there were distractions. (I’d been going non-stop since Thanksgiving and some chores had piled up.) And there were more edits that needed to be done, scenes that needed to be rewritten and new scenes to be created than I had anticipated.
When I told them I was working on my book during my vacation, many of them said, “I used to write,” somewhere in their response. I was surprised though by how many people used to write. It was always “used to,” never “I write,” or “I still write.” I think editing is what makes the difference. Anyone can write. But to be a writer – to call yourself a writer – to go for the success, you have to edit.
Editing isn’t just changing words around, fixing sentence structure or misspellings. Editing is telling a better story with better writing. You have to make sure that everything connects, not just in a factual sense, but you need to make sure that the themes and ideas you start off with flow throughout. You have to be critical of yourself. You have to admit how awful something is, or how it has nothing to contribute to the story whatsoever. Even though something may be a beautifully written line, it may make no sense on the page and you have to cut it. Eat your pride. The parts where you find yourself wanting to quit the editing process and put the beast down for a while, is the same thing that will make a reader put it down and maybe never pick it up again.
Most people don’t want to do that. They like the idea of writing. They want to be a writer. Most people I run into “used to write” because they liked the act of writing, they just didn’t like the job. Personally, I hate it at times, but the moment things click and a work is improved, when you’ve created something wonderful that wasn’t there before, that’s when I thrive.
When I told them I was working on my book during my vacation, many of them said, “I used to write,” somewhere in their response. I was surprised though by how many people used to write. It was always “used to,” never “I write,” or “I still write.” I think editing is what makes the difference. Anyone can write. But to be a writer – to call yourself a writer – to go for the success, you have to edit.
Editing isn’t just changing words around, fixing sentence structure or misspellings. Editing is telling a better story with better writing. You have to make sure that everything connects, not just in a factual sense, but you need to make sure that the themes and ideas you start off with flow throughout. You have to be critical of yourself. You have to admit how awful something is, or how it has nothing to contribute to the story whatsoever. Even though something may be a beautifully written line, it may make no sense on the page and you have to cut it. Eat your pride. The parts where you find yourself wanting to quit the editing process and put the beast down for a while, is the same thing that will make a reader put it down and maybe never pick it up again.
Most people don’t want to do that. They like the idea of writing. They want to be a writer. Most people I run into “used to write” because they liked the act of writing, they just didn’t like the job. Personally, I hate it at times, but the moment things click and a work is improved, when you’ve created something wonderful that wasn’t there before, that’s when I thrive.
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