Editing is Hard

Blog No. 123

One of the major parts of my writing day is looking at other people’s stories and giving them an edit. Often I’ll catch a couple of typos, notice some structural weak spots and grammar mistakes, and make a bunch of suggestions on how I think the story could be improved. The things I notice jump off the page (fresh from the pile of new story elements I learned about) and if the story is well written, I can be done a couple thousand words in half an hour (extrapolate for longer stores, chapters etc). Sometimes there is a lot more to point out and the task becomes an arduous task filled with long winded explanations and edits based on assumptions and what I know about the author, but usually things go smoothly. If I can avoid supplanting the writer’s voice with my own, I find I add something to the story, helping the author and learning something about my own writing in the process.

Second Draft

Blog No. 116

I feel like I’m still fairly new to writing. I suppose that’s all relative. Lately I’ve been spending more time with writers who have more experience than I do. It seems, compared to them, I am but a spring chicken. I have been working on writing for a while, and I have gleaned some insights. I’m not one to write a lot of how-to or writing guides on this blog, but I’m in the middle of the second draft of the collection and some thoughts have come to mind, specifically about second drafts. Strangely, I feel that my place in writing (as in the skill and act) is sort of like a second draft. I started by just writing. I had ideas for stories and I sat down and wrote them in a way that made sense to me (and seemed fairly entertaining). Later, through perseverance and growth (and by steeling the knowledge of others) I started to find the faults in my writing. Since then I’ve been working to eliminate them, at the cost of my voice. It’s an important step, though a bland one.

Save it for Later

Blog No. 95

Obligatory comment on 95. If my blog were a person we’d go celebrate with the few blog friends it has left, and probably a bit too much champagne. But it’s a blog, so I keep trucking along. Much like TV shows. (Transition!) I am a re-watcher. If there is a show, movie, book, etc, that I like, I enjoy revisiting it every so often. One of the things I notice that things happen was sooner than I expect them to. That may be confusing, so I’ll try to be clear in my explanation. I remember events happening on the show (like a character leaving, or joining, or relationships and junk) but I think that they happen a few seasons after they actually happen. I underestimate the amount of time the writers took before they had a major event happen to the characters.