Editing

I have never been good at editing. The closest I get is running spell check and making sure that sentences make sense grammatically. I can't really go through a piece and remove and add lines to make it more interesting. I can't polish a turd and make it shine like a diamond, if you will. Instead, if I don't like something, I rewrite it from the ground up. There are some things that I have written, rewritten and written again time and time again. I work on singular stories for years at a time, never really making any progress because I don't like how they're coming up. Maybe that's a writer thing, or maybe it's just me, I don't know. But it makes it hard to make a full, solid story.

I'm not saying editing is a bad thing. Far from it. Editing makes a decent story good, and a good story great. I just can't do it. And that makes progress slow. I've mentioned before that if I get on a roll, I can write like there's no tomorrow. The thing is, that doesn't mean that what I end up with is any good. Maybe it sounds good to other people, but not necessarily to me. Everything I have written on here is a rough draft. There are pieces that I love, and pieces I hate, and those may not line up with what pieces other people love and hate. That's just the nature of it.

I have a few friends who are the opposite. They couldn't write for the life of them, or perhaps they can and just aren't into or don't like the pace that they do it at, but they can edit far easier than I could ever dream. They even enjoy doing it, and I don't blame them. I have the power to create a world. They have the power to refine it, focus it, make it work. That's amazing to me. And so often, they don't get any credit for it.

Think of your favorite author. Think of that amazing world they created, that you can get lost in for hours, that you would kill to live in, even if only for an hour. They had an idea, a beautiful, brilliant idea. But do you really think they could make that idea something so amazing all by themselves? Somehow I doubt it. I mean, it's possible, I won't deny it. But there's a good chance that they had someone help them, and you'll never know who that person was. The information may even be there, free for you to see, but you've never taken the time to look. I know I haven't.

Writer's wouldn't be much without a good editor to help them. And yet we never give the editor any credit. At the very least, not enough credit. It's hard to remember. But it's worth paying attention to. I think I'm gonna start trying to make the effort to learn what kind of editors my favorite authors ask for help. I'm gonna start learning not only how my favorite authors think, but how their editors think. And maybe someday, when I need help, I'll know what I'm looking for.