Editing process, an internal Monologue V. 2.0

I’ve been sorta MIA, stuck in the land of editing, and though that is not exactly a fulfilling land, I can’t seem to break out of it. I need to keep at it. I need to finish.

Strange thing is, with each second spent editing I find more and more stuff TO edit.

The internal monologue changes each time. Edit number one seems tough, and, in a way, it is. You re-read and think, boy, I USE this word a lot. I need to expand my vocabulary. You catch some stupid continuity mistakes and you go, oh, I’m glad I caught this one before sending it to everyone else. You cut out some repetitions and think, I’m really cleaning this up nice.

And then, you send it to someone else.

Every writer should be lucky enough to have someone in their life (or, in my case, more than one person), who can read over your stuff and go: “This is crap. You need to rewrite it.”

It won’t be what you want to hear, of course. And it will suck, I’m not saying it won’t. But it’ll make you better. Your critique partners might not always be right. But they’ll make you think. And the thinking, that will make you better.

So, edit number two is going sorta like this:

I could have SWORN I’d gotten rid of all repetitions. How come I’ve used this exact same word 396 times in my manuscript??

::reads more::

And this …how did I write this? IT’S A TOTAL CONTRADICTION. My character can’t be saying THIS if he’s going to be saying the exact OPPOSITE in two chapters. UGH. I seriously did not think this through. 

::continues reading::

This is boring as hell. NOTHING IS HAPPENING. WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG TO MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN? Oh, God, no. I’m going to have to cut this. And this. And that. And write more. A lot more. Oh, crap. Why did I ever think writing a novel was easy? WHY? WHY?

Sort of. Kind of. Exactly like that.

Editing process, an internal Monologue V 1.0

Well, this should be easy. I wrote a damn good book the first time. Who said first drafts were hard? This was much better than I …

Wait…WAIT.

That’s my opening line? Oh, no. No, no, no. That needs work. But, all right, that’s okay. I caught it in time. Now I just need to come up with …oh, crap. The whole paragraph sucks. But that’s okay. I’m still good. I can fix this. This is why they call it editing. Because you need to change things. I’m sure the rest of the chapter is …eh …well, it’s not that bad. 

But in the second chapter, that’s where this gets good…any second now. Any second …oh …well, yeah. This. I so didn’t think this through from the start. Another inconsistency. At least I can see them now. Maybe I should just put them in red or something, so I can do one complete re-read and then fix all those little things that …

NO.

NO.

::GIGANTIC PLOT HOLE SMACKS ME IN THE FACE::

OMG. OMG. OMG. What do I do now? What do I do now? I don’t know what to do. I’m confused. I mean, didn’t I think this through? I obviously did not think this through. I thought I had. I mean, I did. In my head. I obviously needed to write some of this stuff down. Okay, I’ll go get a notebook. 

There, that’s it. I just need to figure this little plot point out, and we’re golden. Write this down. Yes, yes. THAT. Good. I’m good. I can do this. Let’s just keep reading.

30 pages later…

I wrote the most annoying character ever. How did I expect someone to like her? Or HIM, for that matter. Can he be any more bland? And, what is this plot? It does not make sense? Is there even a plot here? What was I thinking?

I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FIX THIS? 

::cries::

Yo edito, tú editas, él edita…nosotros editamos?

The first draft of anything is shit, dijo Ernest Hemingway, hace ya bastante rato. No voy a ser yo la que le quite razón a Hemingway, pero me parece que hay que ir un poco más allá. El segundo también lo es. Y posiblemente el tercero. Es por ahí, después de la tercera edición, cuando uno comienza a darse cuenta de que es lo que quería decir, y cómo hacer para decirlo.

Empieza, eh. No lo sabe ya. Ve el camino (y esto es, normalmente, lo más difícil). Todavía hace falta más edición para poder plasmar eso que, por fin, uno puede visualizar. 

¿Quieren ser escritores? He tenido la oportunidad de que alguna gente me pida consejo sobre este tema, como si fuera un tema del que alguien pudiera dar un buen consejo, o como si yo, horror de horrores, supiera algo de esto. No me considero particularmente calificada para dar consejos, pero si me gusta divagar sobre lo que siento y pienso. A veces, eso termina ayudando.

Escribir es una cosa que suena glamorosa. Suena a pura inspiración. Lamento decirles que no es así. No realmente. No es un trabajo fácil. Alguna gente les mentirá, dirán, claro, escribir es solo sentarse y poner en papel lo que salga. Y si, muchas veces, eso es escribir. Pero eso no es ser escritor.

No, ser escritor es una cosa bastante más complicada. Es escribir, la primera vez para entender, porque, en algunas ocasiones, las historias parecen estar escribiéndose solas, los personajes hablando a través de uno y, en medio de este proceso maravilloso y complejo y que no pretendo comprender a veces no hay tiempo para pensar, mucho menos para entender. La segunda vez es para corregir errores gramaticales, o de prosa. De la tercera en adelante, ahí es cuando uno comienza a darle forma a lo que uno, de verdad, quería decir. 

Conozco bastantes escritores que odian el proceso de edición. No voy a mentirles ahora y decirles que yo soy una fanática (todo sería mejor si hiciera la investigación ANTES del primer draft, pero bueno, bad habits die hard), pero si les voy a decir que estoy comenzando a apreciarlo. Pueden salir cosas buenas en el primer draft, sí, pero de la edición…de ahí salen cosas brillantes.

Es algo así como carpintería. Pero esto, esto lo dejamos entre nosotros, eh. A los demás, a los demás le podemos decir que es fácil. A los que prefieren leer, y nunca, pero nunca, lo van a intentar, no tenemos que decirles que mientras más fácil de leer es, más difícil de escribir fue.

No, como bien dijo, otra vez, Hemingway: It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

The writing process or… what exactly do you do?

I write a lot about writing, about books, about characters, because sometimes I feel like I’m a writer first, and everything else comes second. But being a writer is a tricky thing. It’s a solitary thing. It’s also a very personal thing. People sometimes ask me about my writing process: How do you write? What do you do? When do you do it? And, sometimes, I answer, but at the same time, I want to tell them: It doesn’t matter. Not really. Not if you’re asking me because you want to do the same. What works for me might not work for you. In fact, what works for me PROBABLY won’t work for you.

But people keep asking. Sometimes it’s curiosity. I think I asked this question a lot of writers when I was starting out, too. And curiosity I can understand. But writers …we’re very peculiar people. So don’t be surprised at how very strange my rituals seem to you. I would even say, don’t try to replicate them. Be strange in your own way.

So, what do I do? I need silence. Complete silence, at least to start. The first line is always the hardest part for me. The first paragraph. Once I’m done with that I can usually continue even without the total silence I like. But silence is best.

And when I say silence, I mean TOTAL silence. I don’t even listen to music. Music is good for inspiration, I will agree to that, but once I’m actually writing, music is just a distraction. And I get distracted very, very easily.

The other thing I desperately need is a computer. If I’d been born fifty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have managed to be a writer. They say people get used to everything, but I can’t get used to writing by hand. I need to type; typing calms me down. Writing things down by hand is just messy and unpractical. It’s for ideas, snippets, for making sure you don’t forget something, but when you actually get down to business, for me, it’s got to be in front of a computer.

Preferably one with internet. See, it’s this thing I suffer from. It’s kinda like OCD. I have to make things right. I have to edit. I want the chapter to come out perfect the first time around (which is, of course, impossible, and terribly impractical and it ends up taking me twice as long to write things because of this), so I have to look up things. RIGHT AWAY. If I don’t, they’ll just bug me. And when things bug me, I just can’t write. 

I’ve heard people that get up early to write (HA. If I could get up early to do ANYTHING, I’d probably exercise more). I like to write late at night. Very late. Midnight is early for me when I’m writing. I don’t know why, but it seems like I’m at my best when it’s dark outside. Almost like a vampire. (But a real one, not a Stephenie Meyer one). 

So, writing process. Everyone has one, I guess. I doubt my little quirks will do you much good, but now I’m actually curious…what do YOU do? What are your little tricks?

How I did NOT win #NaNoWriMo, and yet, in a way, I still WON

So, I did not get to 50k. In a way, it’s disappointing. I got to 45k. That makes it even more disappointing, because I was SO close to 50. I was almost there. I ALMOST had it. And then, I didn’t. 

I got very sick during the last few days. I tried, I really did. But, in the end, it just wasn’t worth it. I had to fight through a lot to get to 45k in the first place. NaNoWriMo was a very different experience than I thought it would be. In the end, I think, a little self-reflection is probably good. For me, and for anyone who wants to try this again. Take a lesson from my mistakes, and all that crap.

The whole shut your inner editor thing is a good advice. It works…for some. For me, it was downright impossible. I lost an ungodly amount of time trying to do this, and then, when I decided to just ignore it, I actually did much better. I realized, I should have been letting my inner editor speak from the first day. My inner editor rules me, that’s the truth of the matter. I can’t keep on writing when I’ve repeated the same word twice in the same sentence. And the overuse of adjectives gives me a headache. I will even lose sleep over it. That’s just the way it is.

It might not be that way for everyone, but that just the point. Everyone should get the chance to be the way they are. Writing is not something that has a blueprint. It’s not the same way for everyone. And that’s just fine.

The other thing that absolutely did not work for me was the word count. Some days 1k was fine. Others I could write 5k. One week in I got so stuck (and this always happens to me, because I suck at planning ahead, I get an idea, I get excited, and I just want to get started, but I’m very bad at figuring out how to get from point A to point B, and when I actually have to WRITE that, well, I get stuck), that I couldn’t write. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry. I had to summon and emergency council meeting (aka my mother and my sister), for a lost afternoon of R&R, which in our world equals shopping and ice cream.  

After that I had to sit down, take their ideas and flesh out what I actually wanted to do. I lost two days right there. And, I needed those two days. I really did. I wouldn’t have been able to FINISH my novel without those two days. But, for NaNo, those were two lost days. Because I should have done that before. And, I didn’t. I can’t. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I need to get going. I need to get my creative juices flowing. And, THEN, I can think about planning. 

So, lesson number one from November. #NaNo works, yes. But, it works in different ways, for different people. I guess you just have to figure out what you want it for, and make it work for you.

Oh, and also, you have to realize that it will make you a lousy friend, coworker, sister, girlfriend, daughter, etc. You will also, eat too much, too little, drink a lot of coffee, eat a lot of ice cream, or just eat nothing at all. November will be a moth of extremes. That’s just #NaNo for you. That’s the way it’s built. Are you up for it?