Editing Blues
Whenever I write a first draft, I always have that horrible foreboding feeling that “sooner or later, I’m going to have to edit this shit.” Over the years, I’ve come to realize editing is just as much an art as writing is–doing it good enough the first time that the editing process doesn’t involve being ass-raped by a self-held red pen. When I mean editing, I mean self-inflicted edits–those things you do when you want the story to live up to your own standards before you give it to anyone else to read. This hit me last night when I was doing the tangent segment for Avondalius and I realized, “yeah, there is a large chance I’m going to have to totally redo this bit, add a lot more here, and maybe nuke this paragraph to oblivion even though I spent a half hour getting the wording to sound right. Fuck.”
When doing something like this, one has a tendency to want to completely scrap the scene and write something entirely new. I had this problem when I was writing Hellion–although, then again, the entire structure of that book was totally hopeless to begin with (you try writing 440 pages–179,000 words–in eight months in one of the most stressful periods of your life and see how editing goes for you.)–starting anew rather than editing what I had. There was a point where Marina and I had a running joke that I wrote a new first chapter every week for the project. I even remember Crimson, a barista friend at Atlantic where I did most of my Hellion work coming up behind me to see me contemplating the words ‘Chapter 1′ written on the top of the page. She shook her head at me and was like, “not again” before walking off. I literally can remember doing 7+ versions of the first chapter.
That actually makes me laugh, considering how my last summer went, where I’d sit in a cafe for five hours staring at a blinking cursor, resisting the urge to scream “FUCK” at the top of my lungs over and over until I was either arrested or tranquilized, or go on a killing spree using my over-sized Inspiron laptop as a melee weapon. God help any of you if you ever get to that point.
I guess this all goes back to what we’ve been learning in Acting: “Acceptance is Perfection.” When you’re in a scene with another actor, the only way to move things forward is to say “yes, and…” thus accepting what the other actor is giving you, no matter how asinine (last week I was coerced into having alien sex with a 40 year old man). When applied to writing, that would suggest you make sure you give any piece of writing a shot, no matter how much grief it gives you. I can relate there, when one piece of dialogue going wrong has prompted me to rewrite an entire ten page chapter (read: two and a half days of writing) to compensate. Big energy waster. And if you’re a professional up against some kind of epic deadline, that’s going to be even less helpful.
I suppose the trick is working around the good stuff in your work, which is probably why a good editor always points out the good stuff as well as the bad. It allows one to work around the stuff that’s absolute shit (which in my case would be a good 70% of my writing). That’ll be interesting when I finally get around to beefing up Avondalius. If it’s as difficult as I think it will be, I will personally record myself cursing violently for your amusement.
… If anyone reads these. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t. Ah, wasted binary. In other news, I probably should think about sleeping one of these days. If I don’t, my brain will surely explode, and that will lead to less than amusing writing.