The editing process

I've written before about how I'm not a very good editor, and how important editing is to a story, and all of that good stuff. And I don't know a whole lot about editing, because I've never been good at it or even really tried to get myself to go into it very hard, so I can't really say a lot about it. But I've been really trying to recently, getting down into the nitty gritty of trying to edit the book I wrote back in November for Nano, and while I haven't made it very far through the story, I've learned a lot about editing just because it's the first time I've really tried to focus on doing it. That doesn't mean any of my edits are any good, of course, and I definitely have a lot more appreciation for just how many times I'll have to go through and edit this, but I have learned a lot.

One of the things I've learned is just how hard it is to actually edit. And I'm not even talking from the technical details of what and where to change, and how to make things sound good, all of that stuff that you think of when you think editing. I'm just talking about the action of editing. Because, as I've been going through and working on this, I frequently find myself just straight reading the story and forgetting to even think about what and how to change things. And this is for something that I wrote. I already know what happens! And granted, it's been like half a year or more since I wrote the story, so I don't remember all of the details. But these are literally my own words. And I recognize as I'm reading that they're not that great. And yet at times I just forget, and I read.

So every once in a while I have to back up and reread things, and reread them again, and make sure that they do actually sound at least something like what I want them to sound like. And that's just on my first go through. I can only imagine how much harder it will get on each subsequent go through of the story, as the story gets slowly more and more refined, and closer to something that I want it to be. And especially if I take as long between each edit to actually getting around to doing it. Hopefully I can get other people to look at it as well, and that will help to speed up the process, and fresh eyes should hopefully be able to catch things that I can't.

But it's interesting, because I always thought of editing as cutting down, and making things shorter. But as I've been going along, it is certainly shorter than it was when I started. But that's because I cut out the entire prologue to the story. And from there, as I've been going along it has slowly been climbing its way back up, which means that the story is actually getting longer. And that's before having even reached the part of the story where I had planned to add a few more chapters. So clearly, my preconceptions of what editing is were wrong. And that's probably a good thing. It makes it more encouraging a process for me personally, because it means my story is growing, rather than just being refined. And the bigger and better my world can be, the better.