Ramblings-n-Writings

I recently mentioned that I was heavily involved with my current WIP. I still am. I got to the point where I had to take a break. My mind is simply tired. The mental activity involved in editing exhausts me to point that it feels like I run a marathon at times. My deadline was self-imposed so I won’t feel too awful if I miss it by a little bit.

If you are a writer, do you ever wonder what it would be like to be an editor or what it is like on the other side of the desk? While I would love to be a writer, I know I am an editor at heart. Editing is my God-given talent. I don’t say that to sound pompous, but it comes naturally to me just how playing a piano comes naturally to some. Writing takes effort for me, probably because I can’t simply write a sentence. I have to backspace, rewrite, delete, evaluate for grammar, write again before going to the next sentence. I’m one of those people that has to have everything close to perfection before moving on.

Somewhere, and I have no clue where, I came across “categories” for writers. Some writers are plodders, some writers are sprinters, and some writers are something in the middle that I can’t remember what it’s called. I’m a plodder. I take my time. Once I finish an article or whatever I’m working on, it rarely has to be overhauled. Everything is in its proper spot and a quick once-over to catch the minor problems makes everything good. A plodder is a writer who will take about an hour to write a 250 word article and spend about 5 minutes revising it. The sprinter is the complete opposite. They want to see the finished product. They don’t care if they make mistakes; they just want the story to get on the page. The sprinter will spend 5 minutes writing the 250 words and an hour revising. They are the people that go through multiple revisions before coming to a finished product. And the writer in the middle that I can’t remember is one who is the ideal writer. The one who writes a draft, revises it, all in equal sections of time. Anyway, all of that is to say that I am a plodder when it comes to writing.

Back to editing… At any given point while working with a manuscript, I have three things running through my head, often simultaneously. First, the actual words on the page. My husband thinks I’m nuts, but I often read the manuscript aloud. This, of course, gives him the right to say that his wife talks to herself. =) I read sentences, paragraphs, sometimes whole chapters this way so I can “hear” the grammar, the flow of words. Believe it or not, I pick up on quite a few word order problems and some other things by reading aloud. At the same time my brain is processing the words, my eyes are looking for punctuation errors, misspellings and the like. Some proofreaders will actually see a comma and say “comma” but I don’t go that far – my DH would send me off to the loony bin for sure! The third thing happening is a constant lookout for logic problems, repetition, inconsistencies, ways to improve, and anything else. Each issue that is found, whether minor like a missing comma or major like repetition, has to be marked, corrected or rewritten. A rewrite requires careful attention to the author’s voice and style so the correction doesn’t stand out as written by someone else. Then the process continues on. At no point do I simply read the manuscript; no matter what stage the manuscript is in, the process is always the same.

The other day I had what turned out to be an amusing thought. I really wanted to get through the final stage and finish with this project. (Who wouldn’t since it’s been lurking around in its various stages for about six months?) So, I thought to myself, “If I can read a 300-page novel in a couple of hours, why can’t I read a 250-page manuscript the same way? Surely, I can have this whole thing done in 3-4 hours if I’m not interrupted.” I sat down with my stack of pages and proceeded to think I would be done by dinnertime. HA! In the time frame of 3-4 hours with almost no interruptions, I completed about 50 pages.

Editing is a slow, tedious process. Perhaps slower than writing. Mentally, it is exhausting. But in the end, it is equally rewarding to writing when I get to hold that printed, bound manuscript that I shared in creating. =)