Yea though I walk through the valley of revisions, I shall fear no edit...

[lagilman]

And lo there was rejoicing, for Staples did deliver, and there was printer paper in the households once again. So today I will be printing out the entire manuscript of Vineart War #1 and settling down with caffeine and red pen (the only time I ever use red pen) to open up a serious can of editorial whup-ass on myself.

Editing is a funny business. I just finished a freelance line-edit where mostly I was smoothing out sentence fragments and correcting some...unfortunate word choices. But I also ended up catching a number of continuity errors and plot-support failures that should have been found in the first round of (developmental/revision) edits. That's what the editor does -- catches the things that the author's too close-up [and tired] to see.

So how can the writer also be editor? Very, very carefully, and with a few tricks on the brain, said tricks differing from person to person.

Some people, I know, can self-edit on the screen. Not me. It may be wasteful of paper, but I need hard-copy. Part of this process comes from all the years editing other peoples' work, I suppose: by turning the book into a manuscript, separating it that way from the thing-I-created, I am able to become Editor rather than Writer, and make judgments based on the presentation on the page rather than what I-the-Writer had in my head. Also, it give me my first sense of how scenes and chapters actually flow, turning pages, rather than scrolling down. There really is a difference.

So that's where I'll be. Except when I'm not.

So how do y'all edit your own work? Or do you have to hand it over to someone else? [I do some of that, too: blessed be the beta reader]

Comments

[puppetmaker40.livejournal.com]

Peter hands things over to me for edits which he will either use or not depending.

I do have to have someone else take a look. I feel like I get too close to the project to read it with a distant eye. I can correct errors as I see them but if I see them.

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

Happy editing!

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

So how do y'all edit your own work? Or do you have to hand it over to someone else? [I do some of that, too: blessed be the beta reader]

I read it over and over until I'm sick of it.

I used to set it aside and write short fiction between revisions (which takes an unconscionable long time) but now that I have these things called "deadlines" I've just been keeping my head down work work work.

At this point I begin to understand David Janssen's quote about working in TV[1].

As for beta readers, they would be great if I had the time to return the favor, and I do see that as a favor that needs to be returned. So, no betas for me.

[1]The quote (as I remember it): "Working in television is like [making love to] an 800-lb gorilla; you don't finish when you want to finish. You finish when the gorilla wants to finish."

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

I can usually edit on-screen. Every now and again, I have to go the dead tree route, which definitely helps with seeing the repetitious word/phrase choices.

What's giving me fits right now is writing this story set in the mid-sixties. It's not really contemporary but not truly historical either. Where, unless you were part of the counterculture, speech wasn't appreciably different-- just maybe a hair more formal. So I'm trying to use the trick of events, product names, etc., to help give the sense of time.

But of course, that brings with it the danger of "My reserch let shows u it!"

Oy.

[lagilman]

But of course, that brings with it the danger of "My reserch let shows u it!

I have NO idea at ALL what you're talking about...

*smacks manuscript before it makes a wiseass comment*

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

Heh-- at least you were able to go do research for yours.

Unless I come across a wayback machine on eBay, no such luck for me. In the meantime, my bills from the bookstore continue to mount.

[bosswriter.livejournal.com]

I can't edit on the screen either. I print and scratch all over it, and then make the changes. Too much screen time makes my eyes cross.

[lagilman]

Yeah -- I know there are decent editing software programs, but I really need to jot notes in the margins and reverses, and mangle paragraphs, and slap post-it on offending sections, and....

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

For a thorough edit, I *have* to print it out. On a screen, I'm reading in chunks rather than in context.

That said, I'm blind to my own work. In fact, my team at work, a group of technical writers who are currently creating a software project, just looked at one another ruefully when we realized that *we* needed a technical writer. Everybody on the team was too close to the product to understand what a stranger needed to understand it. Although we all understood this principle in our bones -- that is why we have jobs -- we hadn't expected it to happen to US!

[windrose.livejournal.com]

I edit as I work. It's kind of like having literary OCD, and it slows the writing process down, but I can't not do it. It's also the reason I've been told my rough drafts read more like final drafts.

I know I can't catch everything, though, so I have a couple of trusted friends I ask to go over my work and look for things I missed. We're not always going to agree, but getting that outside opinion is vital because I'm just too damned close to the thing to be objective.

[lagilman]

I used to edit as I worked, but I found that the plot kept getting hung up while I wrestled a detail to the ground. A friend manages to work everything out in his head beforehand, and so when he write it all flows to a logical conclusion start to finish. My endings are fought out on the page.


And yes, my writing metaphor do tend to be physical, I have noticed that, yeah....

[fibro-witch.livejournal.com]

I have to start with writing it out long hand. Except for short blog posts I can't create anything worth reading.

Then I send it to friends to read, and do a printout of my own to review.

Finally and this is the most important part, I realize that I will never be a creative writer and I run the pages through the shredder.

[lagilman]

*snickers with sympathy*

[kradical.livejournal.com]

I always do what you're doing: print the sucker out and go at it with a meat axe. I'm not sure if it's the shift from Creator Mode to Editor Mode, as you say, or if it just looks more like a book when it's printed, or what-the-heck-ever, but I always catch more when I read a printout than read it on the screen. *shrug*

[black13.livejournal.com]

I wish I had some beta-readers who would actually comment on what I ask them to read and comment on. The end result being that I have to do the second pass myself. Like you, I'm the type who can't do revisions on the screen. I need a printout too. I usually put a manuscript aside for a month or so before doing the second pass (when I have the luxury of not having deadlines, or if they're far enough away).

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

(Disclaimer--I've never gotten paid for a word of material that was supposed to be fiction (other than some stuff in a published article I wrote in second person discribing an imaginary discussion between business associates....)

I mix and match editing on-screen, printing out and marking up the printout, editing on screen and simultaneously editing the printout/going back and forth between them and then printing out agaiin--and sometimes printing out and ignoring the printout, continuing to edit on-screen.... the reason I need the printout is because there I get lost in the on-screen stuff, I can't see multiple pages at the same time, and where what came from and where what is going to.... the same thing happens with printout. Years ago, I was working on a document that lived in the safe in my cubicle, and the security people were getting more and more unhappy with me, as I had a six inch stack of draft material, and I was keeping all my drafts to be able to track what I was writing, and my chain of thought from draft to draft. Due to the time and the technology the drafts were all handwritten, and revising drafts I would when things got sufficiently messy, writer a cleaner draft. I finished the document the day before the government security auditors were due in--that was the reason the security people were getting more and more unhappy with me. I hauled my stack of paper drafts over to the security office, where they accepted it and disposed of it with relief.

These days I often wind up with version after version of things on the computers I use... some of it is that I am an extreme messy desk worker, I need to see what I am working on, and when writing spread stuff all over, and sometimes even need to draw/write, sometimes on paper, sometimes in drawing programs on the computer, sometimes going back and forth (in some cases I have actually typed stuff in applications software, printed it out, and then taken a scissors, blank sheets of paper, transparent tape, cut up the printout into items, and reorganized the items. I cannot do that with the existing lameola software around, even though at work I have dual 1600 X 1200 displays (which I have actually spread Excel all the way across filling up both displays with, one more than one occasion). I really want to be able to move blocks of text around spatially and link concepts, ideaa, etc., and have large virtual sheets of paper, and large vitual stacks of paper, like a multidimensional exploded view map which one can "fold" pieces of to jump over Boring Stuff .... but user interfaces went off in the direction of serial linear long ago and have gotten even more serial linear over time, alas, snarl, grrrr, etc.

Some of the version for the multiple versions is that I crash Word and other word processing programs with depressing regularity--Windows and especially not Word, does not behave nicely with lots and lots of documents open and spread around a virtual desktop (I keep them unopen for the same reasons I have the non-virtual messy desk, it's because spatial distribution in three dimensions is de factor organization of "this is what I am most recently working on, which is related to the stuff which is next to it/under it, the deeper down something is the less recently worked on it is, and the proximity carrying meaning for me and defines, again, content relationships." There are also kinaesthetic factors otherwise, of spatial context/memory and visualization, and the physical placement that involves muscle memory tied to visual-tactical context.

That relates to the "where the hell did I put my keys/glasses/cellphone?" types issues. The most embarrassing cases are looking for keys etc. unsuccessfully that one is holding in the other hand than the one one is trying to dig around looking for keys with, or the glasses on the head trying to figure out where the glasses are. The next most embarrassing cases are heading into a room to get something and then forgetting why/for what one was heading there. In my case it's probably at least part hereditary, my father looking for his glasses, and sitting down on them....