Editing

Spending yesterday editing was a nice change. I’d suspected it might be- at this point in the month any respite from coming up with a new topic is welcome. But it also felt like a different sort of challenge. I am most effective editing when I can bifurcate my brain. To simultaneously remember the original points and tone I was trying to capture while also retaining an untinged perspective on what the writing actually says.

Shifting my brain into such a point of view is always difficult. Maximum page limits on college essays invariably proved more stubborn adversaries than minimums. After all, a stream of conciousness is a valid writing technique. It’s paring that stream down to something intelligible that’s the difficult part.

Our society in general seems to prize creation over editing and maintenance. Everyone jumps to see the deleted scenes from feature films. Salesman need to endlessly pursue new clients. Engineers continually create new features while bugs pile up behind them. Much of this is rightfully driven by a fear of stasis and of slipping backwards. But it can also go too far.

I’m in the last week of NaNoWriMo now, and want to finish strong by writing truly new pieces every day. But I think a natural continuance of this goal will be editing. Spending a week or so going through all of my earlier posts to tidy them up. This will also give me a chance to really read through them all. I’m hoping that will allow me to identify trends of writing issues that I can continue to work on in a more targetted fashion.