How’s the Editing Going? – Small Robot.

Editing is going ok, but slow.  I printed out a copy of Small Robot and I’ve been going over it and marking it up with a regular pen.  I can write on my phone or my computer, but I’m terrible at editing there.  I’ve got a friend that actually goes through the trouble of printing her rough drafts in book form (like from a vanity press or something) and uses the book for editing.  I think it’s a pretty good idea for editing books – they would end up being a lot of loose papers otherwise, but for short stories just plain printing it out on the printer works fine for me. 

Small Robot is about five pages.

It’s interesting – I had my plan for how I was going to go through these phases of editing, but when I acually got out my pen and started the edits, I mostly skipped all the first stuff and went straight to word choice.  I think the main reason for this was because the problems with word choice annoyed me enough that I couldn’t get past them.  So maybe I should change the order and put word choice first and fix all of the annoying problems, and then go back to the big picture edits.  I’ll probably have to do another word choice edit after that but I think the quality will be much better.

I was listening to Mur talking about editing, and she said that the trick to editing is to take off your creative hat and put on your editing hat and to just buckle down and do it even if you don’t really feel like doing it.  Editing is an entirely different process than creating the story, but for me it’s just as creative and satisfying.  It’s kind of like learning a new piece of music.  When you play it the first time it’s kind of rough, you play wrong notes, you make timing mistakes, and hearing the rhythm of the music in your head might be difficult, but as you practice and work on it the wrong notes go away, the timing mistakes smooth out, and the rhythm becomes more natural.  That’s the way I feel with editing as well.

Editing is kind of like doing a puzzle.  You have all of the pieces there, you just need to turn them around and flip them over so that they fit together the right way.

And finally, here’s another white board crayon drawing.  My six year old requested a cherry.

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