Can I just say that I hate editing?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the way my story looks after the edit is done. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing you took your work—that you once thought was wonderful—and made it even better. I’m not talking about shifting around a sentence, correcting spelling or adding half a dozen semi-colons. I’m talking about major scene changes, cutting the fat and rerouting plots gone awry.
I’m talking about staring at that three-hundred double-spaced pages of manuscript that is bleeding ink from a critique and facing down the fact that my baby has some serious problems. Even worse is doing it after facing that same situation on this book through four critiques and an editor, and now I’m doing it again.
There are times when I’d rather be mucking out my chicken coop or scrubbing down the duck pond (Eeewww!) than face two thousand places where someone (even me) found problems with my story.
It’s a good thing I love the story so much more when it’s done.
And that I can look at the pile of pages I’ve finished as I go along and remind myself that I’m making progress.
Still, there are times I would much rather just start a new story and shelf the old one—if only the first one would stop nudging my mind that I’ve been procrastinating the edit. Besides, if the story is as good as everyone keeps telling me it is (despite the copious amounts of red ink they’ve left on the manuscript) then don’t I owe it to myself to get the editing done?
I suppose the coop will survive one more day. Back to editing for me.
Labels: writing