I miss editing. Don’t get me wrong — I love dedicating ten minutes each day to writing. But I do miss digging deep into a rough piece to shine and polish and make it sparkle. I miss getting lost in deleting clauses, adding concrete nouns, removing adverbs, replacing flaccid verbs with active ones.
I submitted a Wine Tourism Conference write-up to our editorial team for the WordPress.com news blog, Hot Off the Press, and I was thrilled when I received a thoughful list of suggestions for how to tighten up the piece. The edits made me realize how much my writing habits have changed. I live by the motto “Perfect is the enemy of Done” these days, and as a result, I publish sloppy work. I’m getting words on the screen, and that’s what I can do with limited time.
Maybe I can figure out a way to add editing back in. Maybe a 2016 goal can be to allocate a portion of my 10-minutes-per-day to editing. I could experiment with a 10-minute write once per week, and use each 10-minute “write” thereafter to refine and polish. That tends to be the distribution of time for completing a stronger piece: 1/7 writing, 6/7 editing. I think I’d like that.
For the month of November, I am participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Butterfly Mind 
6 responses to “I want to edit”
I only love editing when the writer is good. Recently, I’ve been editing a lot of pieces for terrible writers, which makes it much less fun. How did you get through editing poor writing?
Makes sense to me. I found very quickly that writing every day isn’t mine. I go back, rephrase, revise, and even then miss something. It’s a learning curve.
I’m not exactly a “fan” of editing. I tend to go overboard and it kind of bites at my confidence when the words don’t flow like famous novels.
-T
If you miss editing that much, I’d be happy to have you edit my nonfiction book which I’m finishing up as part of NaNonFiWriMo. It’s working title is American Notary Basics: What Every Notary Needs to Know. Wordcount is currently over 50K and I’m still adding articles to it. Deadline to finish the first draft is 11-30-15. Then I will edit it before I send it out for others to proofread. So, are you interested?
Good lesson for me . I am trying on https://shareofheartblog.wordpress.com/
The same! Pruning and restructuring but still managing to preserve the writer’s authenticity is delightful in its own way.