The Evils of Editing (Or, I Need To Stop Blogging and Work On This Book)

See, the thing about editing is that it's hard.

Writing is the easy part. When you're in the middle of writing a sentence and you start to think, in the back of your brain, "Hrm, maybe this sucks a little tiny bit," you can shrug it off, because hey-- that's what editing is for. You'll go back and fix it later, but for right now, it's totally fine to shove a million overheated adjectives in front of that poor little noun. I write like I eat cookies-- I think, "Oh, I'll go ahead and indulge; I can always work it off at the gym later."

The problem is: later on, you're too tired to go to the gym. The gym is too far away. The gym will take such a long time. The gym is too damn hard.

And editing is worse, because, unlike the gym, it requires a certain amount of talent to see results.

Since I'm a poet, I'm trained to be obsessive about details-- which is okay, except that then I often lose sight of the bigger picture. I'll spend half an hour on, say, deciding whether or not to use an Oxford comma, or whether the character would end a sentence with a preposition, but then I forget the more overarching stuff. The big stuff. Stuff like, oh, y'know...character development. And plot.

I mean, if I want to flog this dead horse gym metaphor even more, I could say that, just like exercise, editing can get easier with practice. But even that's not necessarily true, because if you keep giving up on the editing before you've whipped your piece into shape-- or if your piece is so bad it's just beyond whipping-- then you're right back where you started.

Editing this novel is much harder than writing it, particularly since I feel like I could move forward a lot more quickly if I could print the whole thing out. But I can't print that many pages on my printer (printer ink is expensive! I am but a humble secretary!) and my husband's school charges you by the page to print stuff at the library. If I could just get a free print-out of this stupid thing, then I could really attack it with a red pen. And red pen editing is easier than virtual editing for me, because then you have a record of what you've changed. Like, if you cross a word out in pen, that word is still on the page, so if you get twenty pages ahead and realize that the word you crossed out is actually terribly important, you can just write it back in. But if you delete the word from the virtual document altogether, then you might forget what you deleted later on, and that's bad if it turns out you shouldn't have deleted it, after all.

Anyways-- editing. Hard. Ack.

Tips? Anyone?