On my twitter stream this morning, someone compared writing a novel to giving birth, painful but exhilarating. Editing, according to this tweet, is the clean up after giving birth. Not fun, but necessary.
Cue my completely inappropriate brain, envisioning a masked surgeon standing over a table with a marker going “no, no, that finger is totally ridiculous, we’ll have to put something else there.”
I’m not calling anyone wrong. Maybe some people do edit just by taking out the trash, but that’s not me. Although I will admit I like the idea of the stuff I cut as placenta, not trash at all but vitally important to the manuscript’s existence…
When I edit, I have to add scenes, usually several. I have to switch things out and move them around. And also? It’s not in the least like cleaning up an icky bloody mess (well, okay, sometimes it is). Once I get past the flail, I enjoy editing. I love making my manuscript better.
And I’m sorry. But the icky is usually (one would presume) cleaned up by the folks towards the base of the education pyramid. A decent editing job has to be done by someone with the knowledge (and the authority!) to make some pretty severe changes.
For me, editing is more Dr. Frankenstein performing surgery than anything else, and I get to fix my own baby. And then someone else (my brilliant editor Siri Paulson) gets to tell me my creation has eleven toes and I should maybe do something about that… >_>
I’ve always seen editing as sculpting — the first draft is making a huge chunk that doesn’t really look like anything, but the rewrite and edits are putting in the details on the large bits already there.
But that’s probably because my editing is so thorough.
I like that version better. Because i am adding on as well as cutting, shaping things a bit more, et cetera.