Week 82.5 – Red text at night, editor’s delight?

I’ve said before that in my first revision of the Woods novel, I have a lot of red writing where I am tracking all my changes.  Although it can feel intimidating and demoralising, I am trying my hardest to put a positive spin on it.

At the moment, the spin goes something like ‘if it’s red, that means I didn’t just delete it, so it must have had some value’.  It’s a hard sell, I’m afraid…

So today I thought I’d explore some of the positives of editing and cheer myself up.  Hopefully these examples will make you feel better when you’re editing and revising too!

1. Your story is being developed.

Whenever you enhance, correct, improve a section, you are helping craft the story you’ve wanted to tell – it won’t be that story at the first attempt.

2. You are enhancing your vocabulary

During editing stages, you become much more specific with your choice of words, and your thesaurus will become a close friend.  Editing gives you a chance to pick the word with the most weight for the image you are creating.

3. You can correct mistakes before anyone else sees them

We all write things down that make no sense, or have words we can never spell, or mix names up sometimes.  Revisions allow you to correct the worst of it before passing the work to a critical friend or professional editor for review.  But don’t worry if there’s a few left – that’s normal too!

4. You can check your characters

When you revise you can pick up on character quirks that don’t fit the personality you want to convey, or you can correct elements when they come across as more or less sympathetic than you want.  You can make sure they work with each other.

5. You can change technical elements

I’ve changed viewpoint character and tense at the revision stage to make a story more effective; sometimes you need to read through a first draft critically to see these changes are needed.

6. You can improve your work

You have to have a first draft to work from, but from there on you can do what you like to make the writing the best you possibly can.  You can make a work to be proud of, that you can happily share with others.

So there you go, a few points to help me work my way through many thousands of words!  I’m going to bear these in mind as I drag myself through the editing.

On Sunday I’ll have the new timetable ready; it’ll be editing-heavy but at least I can look at today’s post and know it’ll be worth it.  One day…

I hope these help you, but if you have your own positive slant to put on editing, please share it in the comments!

Happy writing,

EJ

🙂