Now onto Editing...

"…your reader is at least as bright as you are." William Maxwell

We have written our work and are now ready to edit it. Editing is the stage of the writing process in which a writer or editor strives to improve a draft  (and sometimes prepare it for publication) by correcting errors and by making words and sentences clearer, more precise, and more effective.
 
The definition of editor is:
(1) An individual who oversees the preparation of text  in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and books; short stories, manuscripts, etc.
(2) An individual who assists an author in copyediting  a text.
 
Writers have internal editors that always sit checking, rethinking and wondering if what they just wrote sounds okay. They go back and keep fixing each sentence to make it the most perfect sentence but in the process they are losing time in their writing day. I already did the blog post about turning that internal editor off!
 
I remember telling my one friend, who asked me to look at her work, to eliminate the overuse of the word AND. Well she had an ‘editor’ friend who told her not to remove the ANDS. A matter of preference? Is one eye different than having four different eyes looking at your work? Yes, all four will say something remarkably different.
 
I remember one time, I wrote this story. I fixed and tweaked my heart out. I asked an editor friend to do a once over and see what she found. My biggest problems were with tense shift, so she fixed them, made the story look brilliant in my eyes, but when I posted it to the classroom, I got hit with all kids of opinions of you should change this or that, and this is wrong, try this, until I put the story in my filing closet, never to be seen again.
 
Not that I mind opinions, but I realized that too many opinions can be harmful to your writing instead of helping you along. All writers (most of them anyway) think they are editors because they got an A+ for twelve years of English class. A grammar pro does not make the perfect editor, nor does a writer make the perfect editor. An editor has to understand sentence structure as well as story line structure; they have to have in-depth knowledge of the writing craft. To me I want my editor educated in the field of writing for many many years before I place my work into her/his hand. Your editor is the next step in getting published.
 
What I want in an editor, and I’m sure editors look for it too, is a like minded individual. We can not expect an editor who has reviewed, written and enjoys the genre of evil, to appreciate a novel about spirituality and God. They will be very cynical and sometimes unable to give you a good edit. Same for a person of faith trying to edit a dark dark text. You might think you can cross the line and be very objective, but really you’re going to find that you’re more critical and putting in your opinion.
 
As you revise your work and make it shine, remember to think before you delete that imperfect word or rearrange the structure of the sentence. When you submit your work to an editor, make sure they are of a like mind because it is then that you won’t mind handing it over to them. And the editor I choose will be with the magazine, publisher of my choice. Right genre, write right!

"To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later." Brander Matthews

Internal Editor

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
C. J. Cherryh

***

Now this has happened to all of us writers at one time or another in our writing career. We open our workspace (document) to write, begin writing, and see a typo or something else that catches our eye, we go back to fix it and do that down the entire page, and realize the entire five hundred words were led by...our internal editor.

As much as I hate to admit it, editing has hindered my writing on more than one occasion. I don’t just mean a proofreading of my work; finding the misplaced comma, grammatical errors, typos and such. I mean editing to where I rewrite a sentence, place a more heavily understood metaphor in its place; trashing an entire sentence and rewriting it to where it looks and sounds right. This has been me on more than one occasion.

I’m here to tell you to shut it off!!! You can not get anything accomplished if you’re always looking back over your shoulder to see the trail (mess) that you leave behind. We must always look ahead and embrace whatever we must at that place in time. Writing is like the long journey which we trek down in life; we’re always doubting, shaking our head, often trying to fix the wrongs and make them right, and how successful was THAT? Impossible!

As writers we always try to fix the wrongs as we’re writing and that is just plain futile! It gets you nowhere and certainly doesn’t keep you writing. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It might not be a secret, maybe all writers have found this morsel as they grow as a writer.

1. Open your document and turn spellcheck off!!!
2. Start writing and DON’T look up at the screen!
3. Don’t stop until you feel that you’ve hit 500 words, AT LEAST!

Okay, now you can look up at the mess, I mean writing. If this is enough writing for you. Stop and fix. If you’re writing a short story, look back down at the keys and begin writing again, another five hundred words. Keep doing this until you’re done for the day and you’ve accomplished what you came for.

Don’t allow your internal editor to tell you what to do! Too often we listen to others around us or that small voice inside, and we’re ready to listen to it too, because we always think it to be right. Well I’m here to tell you the truth. Nine times out of ten, that voice is wrong and just wants to confuse you and lead you astray. Know anyone like that?

I grew up in a household full of negativity and had to teach myself how to break free from that scary inner voice and listen to the one true voice that God gave me. One Voice- one truth. Remember that! As you’re writing and the voice says, ‘that’s no good! You stink.’ Turn it around and repeat after me, ‘MY WORK IS GOOD! Not GREAT BUT GOOD!!!’

As you continue to feed a positive affirmation to the mix, the negative voice sounds like a muffled taped-mouth voice! Eventually ONE VOICE will win, and it won’t be that lackey the internal editor!

Something Wicked this way Comes

Genesis 1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
***

Something Wicked this way Comes...

Just so you know, I write spiritual stuff. I embrace the light and everything that means to you and me. I try my darnedest to walk in an upright manner sharing and giving love where it might lack. But as for my writing, now that’s a totally different story. (Pardon the pun.)

Most of the time when I’m writing a short story, I start off with my heroine as this upstanding epitome of the highest perfection, then as I’m sitting there writing, something takes over my character and things start to happen. It is as if she has been overcome by the dark force and then my story heads down a path of unknown.

A discussion began in the f2k class when a woman asked if she was the only one where her ‘people’ seem to take charge and the story basically writes itself or is written by these people (aka characters.) Many of us writers piped in to assure her that not only do our characters claim full reign but that what we had intended on the story being took a turn somewhere along the line and we came up with something utterly different than what we proposed the story line to be about.

I’m wondering if this ghost that takes over is our conscious turning off the internal editor. You see, we all write with the internal editor on. We backtrack every paragraph, we spellcheck a page, we’re constantly checking for consistencies and inconsistencies. With that mind, remember, you lose something along the way. You’re so worried about everything being right, you miss the point of where you went wrong.

As writers we can not try so hard that we lose sight of the story. I’m telling you, when you try to write a story, when you try to get it perfect, when you keep trying so hard to make everything right, it is at this point that you’ve lost the basis of your story. You’ve allowed the characters to quiet down and hide in the shadows. You have essentially put tape over their mouth’s and you, the writer creator of the work, has taken over to make your work perfect.

Guess what? Nobody is perfect! I bet that was enlightening wasn’t it? You need to put tape over your brain! ha ha. Turn the internal editor off. Don’t tell me, but, but, but it is too hard. Tell me, okay I will and see what kind of story you write. You’re characters will come out of the shadows, they will become people who are shaped by your fingers but their conscious. They will carry an air of mystery with them as good verses evil challenge each other to a duel. The characters will become people, no longer cardboard cut-outs. Living breathing entities.

In essence, something wicked this way comes.

Internal Editor

My internal editor is always busy.

For me, when I use my MS Word, it is always showing up red squiggly lines that are calling for me to take a look at. I want so much to fix all of those little red squiggly lines, but I’m telling you, for now leave them alone.

When we are writing, and we’re on roll if we hesitate because we see something that needs fixing, we are more than likely going to lose the flow of words and possibly lose sight of the story!
You can go in to the tools, scroll to find options and don’t allow the ‘checking’ of your work. Or you can turn the internal editor off in your mind! Tell yourself that you will not check and re-check until you are completely done so that you can get a good amount of work accomplished in your day. That means tons of writing, whether good, bad or grammatically incorrect!

This doesn’t mean that you can become lazy in your short stories or articles or even your writing prompts. No, for those you WILL need to do a spell check BEFORE you post them so that your peers are seeing your very best work.

Now remember that your spell check does not know the difference between by and buy so you will need to be diligent in reading your own work when your done. Sure the red squiggly lines will show up fixing something like "werd" when you mean "word" but it can not read the writer’s mind. (Don’t we wish?)

Why hasn’t Mister Gates come up with a mind reading device? Why hasn’t the government for that matter? Well I’m glad no one has as of yet because we Americans are lazy enough in letting a microwave cook for us, a clothes dryer dry for us, and now we want a perfect word processor? NO!

This internal editor is normal. Even in my younger years of writing with a pen and paper (I must be old!) I always wanted to use an eraser and fix my error. Then they created pens WITH erasers, and then we were treated to the luxurious white-out for type-written material. All that this did was make us lazy in our writing habits.

What I am saying is, TURN IT OFF! There is no need to fix your work as you are writing because only YOU are going to see it. Let the flow run like a river. Allow your muse to take over the keyboard and keep typing without looking at the screen! That’s an order!

Glance up occasionally to make sure your getting down what you intended, but please don’t go back and fix typographical errors!!! You'll lose site of the natural flow of things.

Be the writer that you know you can be. Treat the art with respect and it will reward YOU with respect in return!

Now stop reading and get back to writing!!!