Why editing is a shitshow, but I’m still doing it

I haven’t posted much about editing Lioness lately — because, let’s be honest, editing sucks and I have been avoiding it a lot.

Reason number one why editing sucks

It’s hard to tell “something is broken and needs to be fixed” from the normal anxiety of being a writer and hating everything you’ve ever written.

Reason number two

It is basically impossible to see your writing with enough of an outside view to edit it adequately.

Oh, people claim you can. There are all kinds of editing methods aimed at giving you a new view of your writing. Edit backwards. (I’ve never understood this one — by word? By sentence? By paragraph?) Change the font. Export it as an ebook and read it on a device.

These are good for catching prose-level stuff, but I think they are useless for structural-level stuff. It won’t tell you, for example, that the character that you have in your head isn’t on the page.

“Put your MS in a drawer for a while” is another method I’ve heard of gaining objectivity, and this has some truth to it. I’m certainly more objective about stuff I wrote years ago. But a mere month or two is not enough for me to sufficiently forget all my infelicitous authorial choices.

Reason number three: lack of concrete goals.

Right now I’m working through a list of potential edits, based on comments from alpha readers and my own impressions after reading the full draft. I feel like I never get to cross anything off this list. “Make viewpoint really tight on Yfre throughout” is not a point at which you arrive, at least not until the very end. Or sometimes I’ll partially implement something (like “make it clear early on that deep sea navigation isn’t possible”) but realize I need to do it in more than one place to be really effective.

Reason number four: unhelpful criticism.

I mean, my writing group is great, and I have some wonderful feedback from my alphas. But then there is feedback which is basically, “make this novel something else entirely,” and that is not helpful. At its worst it depresses me for days and makes me wonder why I even bothered spending the time to write this novel.

Reason number five

Ultimately it is not instructing my twelve tiny dwarves to build a shelter on a barren wasteland and fight off hordes of monsters.

The Way Forward

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last month last few months last approximately forever largely avoiding doing it, but to get back on the bandwagon, I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in April–

… and that kind of fizzled. According to my highly unscientific calculations, I did ~6 hours of editing in April, but then larp season happened.

One big change I have made recently — which I tentatively think may be the best life change I’ve ever made — is to change my work schedule from 10am-6pm. Not only am I avoiding the worst traffic, it also means I can get 45mins to an hour of work in before my day begins.

Assuming I wake up at the same time. Which is sometimes hard after a holiday weekend spent bingeing on video games. But I seem to have gotten back on track, just in time for the weekend 😉

I’m really hoping to be done by the time the Pitch Wars submission window opens in early August. Though, seeing as I am still busting and reconstructing complex relationship structures in the first third of the book, maybe this is too optimistic.

All of this kvetching is to say, for those of you who ask: I’m still doing it. I may hate doing it, but persist.

I just hope that at the end what I have is a polished gem, not a shoebox full of story fragments.