One of the
reasons why it’s so easy to edit the work of others, compared our own, is
because we have all the distance in the world from it! We haven’t spent hours
or days (or YEARS) with our minds perplexed over every little period placement.
So we can make an honest judgment about the quality of the work.
Why is it so
difficult to do this with our own work? Because, not only will we justify the
problems, or settle with them (“It’s better than the first draft…”), but we’ll
get caught up in the original vision we had for a scene or the initial way we
phrased that sentence because it was pretty darn clever! Well, wasn’t it? Maybe
not, if it pulls you out of the story or gives you that uneasy feeling every time
you read over it.
We can edit
others’ work better than our own, because we’re not bogged down with our own
intentions. Although it was with good
intentions that we wrote that risky metaphor, comparing a celery stick to a
Hallmark card, intentions can often lead us astray.
What can we do,
then? How do you get that necessary distance from your own work when you’ve
just spent an hour trying to decide whether you should write “Martha said” or “said
Martha”?
Unfortunately,
there is no easy way—sorry, no miracle solution here.
BUT (I knew you
were waiting for it), you can create some
space! You just need some patience—ugh, I know right? Who has time for
that?!
YOU do. Or you
have to. I’ve found that the best way to look at my own writing with fresh and
semi-less-biased eyes is to spend a day or more away from it. Now, obviously
this isn’t something that you can resort to every day or you’d never be done. But it’s important to get
some space after a chapter or other breaking point before heading back for some
intense editing. Step away from your own all-consuming thoughts about that ONE
DARN PARAGRAPH for a day, and get some insight!
This post isn’t
meant to downplay the importance of enlisting a few trusted writing peers to
look over your work, but as I’m coming to the end of my own book’s first
chapter, I’m gonna be focusing on the early stages. And you never want to open
yourself up to that kind of critique (no matter how good-intended) that early
on.
Remember how
those intentions can lead you astray? You don’t want to be influenced like that
when you’ve barely discovered where you and your characters are heading. No
matter how many years you’ve been detailing the past, present, and futures of
their lives, we all know that the book we set out to write is never the one we
end up with in the end, so we don’t need any extra help pushing it off course from
our initial vision! We have a specific story we needed to tell here, after all!
Exercise the
restraint you need to get some space and insight. But after you’ve gotten a
better idea of where you’re going, and a fair amount of chapters under your
belt, enlist the help of a friend. They’re likely to catch what you’ve missed (or
maybe been denying to yourself).
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