amusedI'm always fascinated by the way different people approach the editing process. I know authors who don't let anyone see anything until the book is finished for the first time. Authors who hit a single chapter eighty times before moving on to the next one -- they may be slow, but dude, when they finish a book, it is finished. Me, I tend to run as fast as I can from one end to the other, editing and correcting as I go, and throwing chunks of text to the wolves as frequently as I can.
Right now, I'm processing edits to A Local Habitation provided by Mary, who has developed a vendetta against the British comma. Seriously, she's like some sort of twisted naturalist, stalking them through the wild paragraphs, and clubbing them to death like baby harp seals whenever they're stupid enough to come into her sight. I'm afraid she's going to start taking shots at me. She's also going to war against my tendency to insert semi-colons wherever I can swing it. This is why I love Mary so very, very dearly. Also why I will never actually let her near me with a red pen.
I have about five stacks of edits to process after this (gulp), and then it's on to the denouement, which will hopefully do me a favor and not hit me like a ton of bricks. Ah, editing. Ah, criticism. Ah, snark.
What are your feelings on editing? How much is too much -- and how mean is too mean?
May 20 2008, 18:53:01 UTC 9 years ago
Someone handing me something and saying "Hey, do you think there's any potential here?" will get a response to that question, along with whether I think it needs a lot of work or just a little polishing.
Ask me for detailed critique, and you get, well, detailed critique. If I can find things to critique - sometimes, I miss stuff. But if you ask for a critique, that's what you get - anything that catches my attention that I think you need to know. I'll try to be polite about it if I can, but I'm doing no favors to someone who asked for serious critique if I fail to point out that the guy who was a vegetarian on page 80 is eating steak on page 115 with no qualms. (Of course, I'm also likely to miss details like that one, but assuming I spotted them!)
If someone tells me it's a first draft, don't mind the dust or the misplaced punctuation yet, but does the story work? then I'll focus on story elements. That sort of thing. It really depends on what they're asking for.
I don't do enough writing that's meant to go anywhere to ask for critique, because honestly, if it's just for me, it doesn't have to be shiny. But I generally used to have three categories in mind when I was actually trying to publish poetry - things that are just for fun (no critique asked or wanted; also not going to do anything with it unless I get to the point where that changes!), rough drafts (general input on whether it's worth polishing or if any lines work really well, but not detailed), and later drafts (machete!).