The Writer’s Coin

It took me a while to come around on the importance of editing. When I first started writing, I thought that all I needed was to “inspire myself” and jot everything down in a flurry of creative energy. Sure, editing was good to catch typos and play with some commas, but otherwise I felt like the writing itself shouldn’t change. The story should stay the same. I guess I still had it in my head that writing was this fantastic, creative ride that you simply had to ride and good stuff would come of it.

And I was wrong, of course.

That creative impulse exists, I agree, but it most definitely needs to be honed. As I wrote before, most first drafts are pretty shitty. It’s the following step, editing, that turns that raw material into something worth reading. And sometimes it takes a lot longer than the actual writing.

Real-Life Examples

I still struggle with this occasionally — especially when I’m trying to edit a story or essay. Shouldn’t I leave that scene as is? I mean, there was something that made me write it that way, right? It’s tough to separate yourself from what you’ve written to become just an editor of it. But you need that cold eye to be ruthless so you can get rid of crap when you see it. That’s why I like to put away a piece for a week or two after I’m “done” writing it before I start to edit. It makes it fresh again and I’m not as attached.

I’m lucky because everyday at work I get a chance to see the power of editing. I’m on a tight schedule so I have to come up with fresh material to write about every day. That means scouring the news, coming up with a good story related to investing and then hammering it out. It has to be fun and entertaining, but it also has to have some meat to it — no easy feat. So what I do is read as much as I can about the topic or companies and then just write as much as I possibly can. Write, write, write. I don’t worry too much about spelling or how good it is or anything. All I want is to say everything I’ve got to say on the subject. Once that’s done, I print it out and take a fresh look at it on paper. It’s amazing how different a piece looks on paper than it does on the computer (it’s a process I also use for my fiction). Then I take out my red pen and make the article good. As I read through I think to myself, “Thank god I’m editing this because it sucks/doesn’t make sense/(pick a fault and insert here).” Without editing, all these stories would be crap.

It’s a little microcosm of my fiction-writing process that teaches me/reminds me of how important it is to edit. This is the step of the writing process that makes for great writing. I don’t want to undermine that initial burst of creative energy — after all, there would be nothing to edit without it — but I’m a big believer in this.

I’m thinking of posting a story/article on here with the first version and then the edited version to show how drastically something can be changed. I’ve seen it in different writing magazines and it’s really amazing to see how bad something was the first time around, only to see it got published somewhere after a few edits.

Tags: editing, Writing