quillpunk | some musings on writing (and editing) (Reply)

So I hate editing. This, I've learned, is a fact.

I finished the 1st draft of AGSH (my winning NaNo project last year) in the start of Feb. I felt good about it! It's a cool world with cool characters and I adore... a lot about it. And that pause there is kind of just the tip of the iceberg. Because once I finished it I set it aside; I wrote the whole thing in 4 months, my previous record was about 15 months, and the project before that about 4 years. So 4 months? Amazing!!

But I set it aside, finished the outline for my current project (which was also my Camp NaNo project) referred to here as TGT. Kind of flunked out of March; I only wrote 5k on TGT in March, and was only starting to get my groove back at the end of the month. I updated a fanfic, started a new one, officially abandoned an old one -- the usual.

It's now been about 2 months since I finished AGSH and I just don't wanna touch it.

I hate editing.

It's not that editing and revisions needed are too daunting a task; it's the process itself I hate. It's a chore; annoying, dull, and entirely critical of my own writing in a way that also entirely steals the joy of writing something. I can't imagine a life not writing. It's joyful, it's curiosity, it's coping with shitty things. Writing is fun! I wanna do it forever!

I'm not actually sure I can properly articulate my problem with revising and editing. It's not fun, I dread it with every bone in my body, and the idea of a draft going through multiple rounds of edit like everybody says a draft need? Nauseating. I can't do that. That's the thought that's paralyzing--the idea that it needs to be done over and over and over again.

But the paralyzation can be worked past. It can be ignored. It's only an obstacle if I let it, right? It's a drag, but I could do it. That's not what's stopping me in my place.

It's the fact that, once I get some distance from a project I kind of... don't like it. It's not the writing that bothers me, really, or that I think I wrote it badly and it doesn't work right or something. I just lose interest in it. There are a thousand other stories in my brain clamoring to get written down, and my brain has designated that draft as 'complete' and the idea of returning to it, even if a I have a solid idea of what should added, removed, changed, etc. is kind of incomprehensible.

I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well, or if I'm actually getting across what I mean. But with AGSH, it's a profound unwillingness to work on it. It's not the idea of editing and revising that freezes me, it's the fact that I just don't want to touch it. And maybe that'll change! That would be great! But I'm not hanging all my hopes on that!

And that brings me to this; somebody I follow on Mastodon posted a link to this blog post about how to write a clean (basically a publishable) 'first' draft without using subsequent editing aside from proofreading.

That sounded really interesting, because my brain designates things as 'done' and then won't get close to them again, so not needing to fix things after? Sign me the fuck up.

So I bought the author's Writing Into The Dark book which touches some on the whole cycling method but doesn't go into any details, and the good feeling continued. Also, I saw a comment somewhere where somebody referred to it as 'looping' instead of cycling and honestly, that sounds cooler so I'm just gonna call it that now.

The distinction with is that the editing, revising etc. all occurs while writing that first draft in a lot of series of loops. It's not that the draft is an agonizing mess and you refuse to keep working on it, it's that you do that additional work without every saying 'stop, this is done now' until it actually is all done.

I have started a new short story (well, it's at 4k already and not even half-way done so it probably won't be that short, LOL) specifically to try out this method of writing. Gone through some editing loops already of the earlier parts and so far... it was pretty painless. It didn't feel anything like editing a completed 1st draft does for me. Both in the comments of the post and in the book I read, the author places a lot of emphasis on creative vs critical voice when writing, and evidence so far points to it helping.

That said, I'm not gonna make any judgments on whether this works for me or not until I actually finish this short story. And probably another one for more data. I want concrete evidence before I turn over my entire writing process, LMAO.

But even if it doesn't work for me at all, if the progress right now is just beginner's luck, all writing practice is valuable and if nothing else, I might figure out how to make editing bearable.

So I like it so far.