At the moment I have a lot of editing and rewriting to do. I'm finishing up the first draft of a novel and I know I need to go back and make some improvements. And at my last writing workshop the group gave one of my short stories a thorough working-over, so now there's that to revise, too.
I have a suspicion that editing and revising is the hardest part of writing for everyone. How many times have you read a book (or seen a movie) and come away wondering how the creators could miss the obvious flaws? And yet it's incredibly difficult to do that to one's own work. That's why we have workshops, and how editors earn their salaries.
Here's a theory about why that is the case. Writers think of a story as an object. When it's done, it's done, and if they go back and change things it could spoil all their work.
In the days when manuscripts were literally script by mano, or even typed, that was a genuine issue. A story was a physical artifact, and fooling with it was a permanent process. Even if you reversed a change, the scratch-outs and scribbles in the margin were still visible.
Word processing changed that: I can have a thousand versions of each thing I write. I can completely change it, and if I don't like the changes I can revert to before I started. Revision should hold no fear for writers armed with laptops and thumb drives.
And yet it still does! Because we don't think of a story as one permutation of words, to be altered or tweaked. We still think of stories as real things.
Because they are real. If you tell a child the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," then tell it to her with a difference, the child will be outraged. "It wasn't soup, it was porridge!" "She was in the baby bear's bed, not the mama's!"
Stories are real -- and yet, of course, they aren't. They're literally figments of someone's imagination, written down or passed on by word of mouth.
When a writer faces the challenge of editing his own work, he's changing something real. He wrote that story and now he's killing it -- even if there's a saved version on the desktop.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some darlings to murder.
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