Editing seems easy. After all, you take the pages, sit down, and wade through. You have the illusion of being omniscient. The pen flies across the page and the manuscript becomes more brilliant. Sometimes it can be like hitting a wall. Maybe you realize a mass of changes is needed and suddenly you’re plunged back into the trenches of writing.
So, at the end of the day, if you’re using words as your playthings to convey stories, I say editing is writing. Now for the real question. Are writing and editing ever done?
Advertisements
Yes when you throw up from reading the sentence for the millionth time. That’s when you put down the pen, and ignore all further ‘advice’.
There does come a point where you have to walk away and get some much needed perspective….
I’m on the editing track of the first book in my farming memoirs… again (at least 4 times I think), and hoping this is the last. I suspect it never really ends, but sometime you just have to say ‘Enough… this is as good as it gets for now.’ Accept that and leave it alone, and equally accept that somewhere in the future you would do it differently, and that’s OK. You will be a different person then, too.
I agree. I began my current project in some ways back in high school. One of the characters appeared, unbidden, in my head and has not left since. I am a different person and the character has grown in response to that.