In which I complain about editing

[sholio]

Good luck to all of you NaNo writers! *tips hat* I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year; it's more like NaNoEdMo, because I intend to spend my November this year dusting off my completed rough drafts (3 novels, 1 novella) and cleaning them up.

... or at least that was the idea. >_>


What I have on my editing docket is currently thus:
- an SF YA novel written in 2007/2008 (it was my 2007 NaNo, but I completed it in January of the following year, which I jokingly called JaNoWriMo)
- an SF novella written in 2008
- a fantasy YA novel started in 2006, completed in 2010
- an urban fantasy novel completed this past summer

Here is what I have discovered so far:

First of all, I really have learned to edit, or at least learned to kick my brain from "writing" to "revision" mode! And this is HUGE for me, because this is something I honestly could not do before. Oh, I could do line edits, and I could revise things a bit, but being able to take a whole manuscript, rip it apart, find the basic threads of theme and plot and figure out what I need to do in order to fix them -- I've kinda learned to do it over the last few years, and working on that long WC story this fall was my Editing 101 final exam, because I revised and rewrote the heck out of that thing. *g*

Before, I would look at a big manuscript that needed to be edited, and start poking at it on a sentence-by-sentence basis ... fix a thing here, a thing there ... maybe I'd even identify something that was structurally unsound, and attempt to fix it. But I was never able to do what I can do now, which is to look at the whole thing and go, "Oh, no wonder this feels weak, there's no character growth", or "this entire scene serves no purpose except a bit of cute character interaction; I can easily put that dialogue into this other scene and cut the deadweight". And so forth.

I was feeling on top of the world, until I realized that EVERYTHING I'VE WRITTEN now feels hideously, painfully deficient to me, and is going to require massive amounts of not just revision but wholesale rewriting. ;_;

The YA novel from 2010 I've shelved completely at this point, because it's going to take so much reworking that I may as well just take the characters (most of whom I really like) and put them in a whole new novel. The whole premise is heavily derivative, the first 20,000 words are mind-numbingly boring deadweight (which nevertheless contain seeds of important plot and character development that needs to be worked in somehow), I can't figure out what POV I want because nothing actually works right for the whole novel (so right now it switches from single-POV to multi-POV in the middle, but I need to stay in that single POV for the first half or I lose the entire element of suspense, and yet I need the multi POVs later) ... AUGH. Yeah. This one's probably never going to see the light of day.

The NaNo from 2007 I still really like, but I now realize that the basic premise for the entire plot doesn't make ANY SENSE AT ALL; it requires human beings to behave in a completely unhumanlike way -- that is, to do something which is nonsensical and completely counter to their own interests for no reason at all other than to kick off the events of the story. I can think of a different plot that would probably work, and I can keep the first half of the novel mostly intact, but the last half is going to need to be completely tossed and rewritten from scratch. Also, there is a metric buttload of research to be done before I can even outline it.

The novella - I took one look at that and went "Wow, there is no character growth at all in this". However, I can see exactly where a thread of character growth and development should go (no wonder the whole thing feels flat and a bit juvenile to me). I also found myself wanting to hard SF-ify it - take out the random space-opera-ish references to things like stunners and the implication that they have FTL, and replace it by seriously figuring out how their society and technology works. Which will probably require as much research and effort as just writing something fresh from scratch...

It's like fractal editing! I started off thinking that I had a manageable amount of work to do, but I look at it more closely and discover that each subtask has just expanded out to the size of the original task. AND IT JUST KEEPS HAPPENING. *sobs*

It's partly a side effect of having waited so long to edit these stories, too. I've changed a lot, and grown a lot as a writer since 2007. I have different priorities now than I did then -- I'm a lot more interested in my characters' inner lives, for one thing. I can recognize weaknesses in my own plotting skills that I never would have seen four or five years ago, so what seemed like a perfectly sound, sensible story to me then seems like a hopelessly deficient collection of plot holes now. Or else it isn't what I want to write anymore -- I think that's what's happening with the one that I want to turn from space opera into hard(er) SF: there's nothing inherently wrong with the handwavy science in the original, but now I want it to make scientific sense, which means tossing some of the less plausible plot devices and coming up with new ways to accomplish the same thing. (This is something of a problem since the whole story is based on an implausible plot device -- flying horses -- but I think I can make it plausible by giving them much lighter gravity; it is an alien planet, after all.)

All in all, I think I'm starting to see why a lot of pro writers recommend that you'll get a lot farther a lot faster if you write something new rather than continuing to rework your older stories. I'm not ready to drop any of these except that one YA (I really think it's unsalvageable, though I may change my mind later) but I'm starting to see how you could conceivably spend ten years rewriting the same novel over and over, never really getting anywhere.

Comments

[tei]

This was a really interesting read, and... sounds like a nightmare :P I think I'll stick to nano for now, since my nanovels are basically snapshots of where my brain was in November of whatever year, and occasionally contain witty banter, but not many other redeeming qualities. Good luck with nanoedmo!

[sholio]

*grins* Thank you! Good luck to you too! I also find it very interesting to look back on my previous years' writing as a snapshot of myself in time; I think that's one of the reasons why I'm having so much trouble revising these novels, because I'm no longer quite that person anymore, and I hadn't realized I had changed so much.

[trobadora]

I wish I even got as far as you have, with all those drafts to be edited! Necessary rewrites or no. But I'm stuck, stuck, stuck on absolutely everything. *sighs*

it requires human beings to behave in a completely unhumanlike way -- that is, to do something which is nonsensical and completely counter to their own interests for no reason at all other than to kick off the events of the story

I feel like real people do nonsensical things like this all the time! Alas, fiction must be more reasonable than truth. *g*

I also found myself wanting to hard SF-ify it - take out the random space-opera-ish references to things like stunners and the implication that they have FTL, and replace it by seriously figuring out how their society and technology works.

Hee! I definitely applaud that.

[black-raven135.livejournal.com]

I have done beta work in some fandoms..........and now my neighbor across the street is having me do editing for her business correspondence.....
I told her about beta and like my sister, she thinks its quite nuts
Why do people think that?
I mean what is wrong with people writing ff? They write other things
so what exactly is the problem?

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Wow - even if they need too much editing to be salvageable, that's still a respectable number of completed drafts!

This would be the main reason I've never finished any of my earlier novels; by the time I start approaching the ending, I'd already changed enough as a writer to find them not worth it. There are a couple things I've considered rewriting, but it would have to be pretty much from scratch...at this point, though, my own challenge is just to finish something! (paired with the need to get it through my head that said something doesn't have to be "good" per se; readable and entertaining is a high enough goal for now!!)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Three novels? That is freaking amazing. Editing sucks, so I feel for you. But I think that's an awesome way to spend November! Best of luck!

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

But stories have been written and finished, which is something to focus on and keep the motivation alive when all else feels hopeless ;)

Things like what you described make me glad I was so distracted by fanfic that I didn't get any original fic done, because I only would've ended up setting it aside (which happened with the one original fic I did attempt at the time).

I used to hate editing, especially when I would read a story, know that something was wrong but couldn't wrap my brain around what it was. Like you said, it used to be about fixing the story a sentence at a time. I couldn't fathom anything being so wrong with my stories as to have to rewrite anything. But I've not only come to terms with it but actually like it, because the more I fix the more I see the story coming together.

But those big things - like character development and theme - still intimidate the heck out of me. It's still difficult to focus on the heart of the story when what I want to focus on is the structure and basic plot (and not wanting to do anything that would change either).

[sentientcitizen]

The fact that you've been able to learn to look at your writing in this way gives me hope, because it's a skill that I rather lack. I'm super impressed with your ability to NOTICE all these things!

[sholio]

I feel like real people do nonsensical things like this all the time! Alas, fiction must be more reasonable than truth.

Heh. I know! Fiction is much more organized than reality.

I'm actually a little surprised at how much I've accomplished. I'd been feeling as if I wasn't getting anywhere, and then look back on what I've managed to get written over the last few years, and it's really quite a lot. (Though I've also left behind a trail of stuck, abandoned projects. But I'm getting better at sticking with something until I finish it.)

[sholio]

It's something that I never used to be able to do AT ALL, so believe me, if I can learn to do it, anyone can! :)

[sholio]

Yeah, that's exactly where I was a couple of years ago. I used to balk at editing in part because I couldn't figure out what people *did* when they edited a story, beyond fixing unclear sentences, badly written dialogue and things of that nature. It's interesting ... I'm not really sure what's changed, although I think it's partly that I've actually managed to get some experience at editing my own stories (doing this WC story, as much as I struggled and complained while I was working on it, helped a *lot*), and partly that I've become more interested in exploring my characters' psychology and relationships, which, like we were discussing in an earlier post, is difficult to get down correctly on the first draft of an original story.

I think what I've found over the last few years is that editing (like writing) is a skill that can be learned like any other skill, and I've worked on it enough that I'm actually kind of getting it. Not that it isn't still difficult and frustrating at times -- I was actually getting so frustrated on the WC story that I ended up in tears at a couple points, but I'm pretty sure that the discipline of forcing myself to work through those miserable, "I hate this story SO MUCH" places was useful for managing to crank through the second drafts on the other ones I'm currently struggling with. And I've gone from a point where editing was literally impossible for me, to where it's merely difficult, which is definitely a step up. *g*

I totally hear you on having trouble messing with the plot structure of a finished story. One thing that I've found at least somewhat useful is to go through the story after it's written and write down the major events in each scene -- on index cards, as a series of lists, with different colored pens for different plot arcs ... I've been trying a bunch of different methods, but the point is to (temporarily) stop thinking of it as a finished story and think of it as a bunch of individual building blocks that can be moved around as needed. Doing that with the flying-horse story helped me recognize that a couple of scenes weren't actually doing anything -- nothing plot-related happened in them, and I think I'll be able to save the parts of the scene that I really like (some of the dialogue and character interaction) and move it into other scenes between those characters, thus shortening and tightening the story.

[sholio]

Thank you! :) I had been feeling like I'd accomplished very little over the last couple of years, because I haven't been making my daily writing goals on most days, but when I look at what I've done in total, it's really added up! And good luck with your writing as well. :)

[sholio]

ha, yeah, I think that as well as having better editing skills, I'm running into the problem that what I thought was awesome to write about five years ago, or ten years ago, is no longer what I'm into now. I'm not sure how writers keep themselves on task over the course of a series that takes ten or twenty years to write ... well, okay, I actually have a pretty good idea, which is that they allow the series to change as needed to accommodate the author's changing interests (most of the long-running series that I've followed have evolved like that -- Dresden Files, the Vorkosigan books, Stephen King's Dark Tower books, etc).

Still, being able to keep myself in the same state of mind long enough to actually finish a book (and edit it) would be nice. ^^;; "Rewriting from scratch" is exactly the point I've hit with both of the origfics that I'm trying to edit right now (the novella and the YA SF novel), and past a certain point, it's awfully tempting to just write something new and fresh ...

[sholio]

I think a lot of people don't see fanfic as a valid form of creative expression because all they know about fanfic is a lot of vague misconceptions about what it is. Prior to LJ, most of my creative friends were writers of original fiction, and most of them disliked fanfic -- either considered it immoral (a form of stealing), or looked down on it as inferior to original fiction. They had never read fanfic, or had only encountered very bad fanfic (and let's face it, there's a lot of bad fanfic out there), or they simply didn't have the urge to read or write about other people's worlds because they were busy writing their own (which I respect).

Fanfic exercises a slightly different part of my brain than writing original fiction like the novels I was discussing above -- it's hard to describe, except that it feels a bit different to me. Original fiction is harder and more rewarding and something that I would never give up for any amount of money. But I don't want to give up fanfic either -- someone on my flist recently asked for opinions on why people write fanfic, and it wasn't until answering her question that I realized one of the biggest benefits I get out of fanfic is simply that it's a way of sharing joy. It's a pleasure for me to write, and I can pretty much guarantee that someone out there is going to read and enjoy it too. It's a way of increasing the net amount of joy in the world! What could be better than that?

So if your friend asks you what you get out of fanfic, you can tell her that it doesn't hurt anyone, and it makes you happy and it makes other people happy ... does anyone need a better reason than that?

[trobadora]

You always amaze me when you talk about how much you've written. :)

[leesa_perrie]

As someone who thinks trying to write even 1 original short fic is far too daunting, I salute you! But I also hear you on the editing, I've struggled to edit my fanfics and have had to have a lot of the errors/plotholes I've made pointed out to me by betas (not all, I am getting better at spotting problems)!

Actually, the editing and trying to make the fic as good as possible is part of what has killed my interest in writing longer fanfics (not the whole story, there is this thing called lack of new ideas too!) - the one that's with the beta atm is probably the last long one I'll be writing for a while.

Anyway, I hope the editing isn't too painful a process and that once you've started on it, it goes quickly! *hugs*

[sholio]

Thank you! :) *hugs back* And yes, you have my sympathies -- I am actually worried that my newly developed focus on editing/revising is going to make me less likely to end up with finished, post-able stories. I don't want to lose the ability to simply play, which is a big part of what writing is all about for me, and get too bogged down in the minutiae.

ETA: heeee, I just heard scrabbling and peeping on the wall -- THE WOODPECKER IS BACK!

[leesa_perrie]

I don't want to lose the ability to simply play.

Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. Maybe I need to worry less about getting it as good as possible and go back to enjoying writing!

ETA: heeee, I just heard scrabbling and peeping on the wall -- THE WOODPECKER IS BACK!

And the cats go wild!!! :D