Check-in post, day 8

[lola_mento]

Hi there! How are things going today? What did you do, or didn't do? Is there something frustrating you? Any word counts or other progress you wish to share?

Today's discussion theme is editing, inspired by the writer leopard.



[Background — a six piece pie style colour split in three shades of blue. Foreground — a monocled leopard.

Top text: WRITE STORY AND THEN NEVER LOOK AT IT AGAIN

Bottom text: THE THOUGHT OF HAVING TO EDIT THAT TRASH HORRIFIES YOU]

Do you edit as you go or after you've finished? Do you ever spend more time editing than writing? What is the easiest part of editing for you? And the hardest?


By the way, parallelsfic is a fic exchange for rare Asian fandoms. You may want to check it out.

Comments

[curuchamion]

I wrote! Stuff! I'm at my family's house on a very bad laptop (not mine), so I can't give an exact wordcount - but I finished two important relationship scenes that had stalled in the middle! And wrote some other stuff, and decided where in town my quasi-Victorian house is located, and got two maps (a US road atlas and a local bus-route map) that should be helpful to my writing!

Also I just got an idea for another scene that feels important and pivotal, but I'm very carefully not thinking about it till I get back to my own computer or I'll think it all the way through and forget something important.

Oh, and I did research! On the evolution of the Volkswagen mini-bus, which I'm using in my story.

(I also wrote a character/premise intro post on my journal, wherein I ramble a bit about my story, but it's f-locked. If anyone's actually interested I'd be happy to give them access.)

[jagnikjen]

Yay for writing Yay for writing scenes. Yay for research materials! Yay for research!

Sounds like a pretty productive day. Great job.

[chibifukurou]

I did a little writing today, after I got finished with the Mother's day celebrations. Around 750 words.

Editing, hmmmmm.

I have yet to figure out the magical art of self-editing. I have a very hard time going back over a fic line by line until someone else has looked at it.

I'm fine doing the big things like cutting scenes that aren't necessary and sewing up the plot-holes left behind when the plot goes haring off in unexpected directions, but reading and re-reading a fic is enough to drive me to rip the story to shreds and rewrite it. (My first big bang I ripped out and had to rewrite 9,000 words between when I submitted the rough draft and when the final draft were due a month later.)

Which is a big part of why I love my much abused betas. With their help I can take things scene by scene instead of trying to re-read the story and going edit crazy.

[snowynight]

I know the felling, said by one who ripped out her bigbang twice. Yay to the beta!

[jagnikjen]

Yay for 750 words! That's a pretty good chunk.

[soc_puppet]

I wrote about a hundred words or so maybe? I am super proud of myself for it, too, cuz Sunday isn't usually one of my "writing" days, but I managed to build some writing time in ♥ Yay, me! I'm also right at a fun part, so it's entirely possible that I might be writing a smidgen more tonight. Though I'm not promising myself anything; I can feel a headache coming on, etc etc etc.


I do a mix of editing things. I'm a perfectionist at heart, so for the longest time I had trouble getting anything written if it wasn't already EXACTLY RIGHT for me at the time. I've managed to loosen up a bit on that front, but it still bugs me sometimes. I've always done major editing, though where once I would go for the eraser (or, if there was little enough before it, a new piece of paper and re-writing what I didn't want to change) I now just make giant brackets in the margins and label them "Cut this part" or similar. When I do my not infrequent "Re-read this to get back in the story groove" bouts, I sometimes change something, but for the most part I leave the little things - spelling, specific wording changes, etc - for the typed draft. And then I re-read it a few more times, hit post, and compulsively edit anything I missed after that to the extent that I possibly can. Whee, editing!

Anything else to do with editing, I don't really notice on my own :/ I'm definitely the sort of person who would need someone looking over her stuff if I ever intend to publish for money. My writing is decently solid without that sort of editor or beta reader, but often they can make a world of difference.

[jagnikjen]

Yay for 100 words on a non-writing day!

Beta readers, critique partners, editors offer your work an objective perspective and they can definitely make a world of difference.

[jagnikjen]

Surprisingly, I wrote somewhere between 500 and 600 words, leaving me with a practically completed very rough draft. I'm especially excited because this is a smut fic and I had been lamenting my efforts with the smut.

I almost always edit as I go, but then when it's done, I put it away for a time. The length of time I leave it is commensurate to the amount of time I've been working on it. The sicker I am of reading this particular piece, the longer I leave it. :) Then I send it to my beta. Sometimes I continue editing while waiting to get it back, sometimes I don't. That again goes back to how much I struggled with it or how much I like it. If I'm excited about what I've written I'll continue to tweak it. If I'm struggling with it or been working on it for too long, then I leave it alone to get some distance from it.

I rarely spend more time editing than writing.

Easiest part of editing for me...hm...the better question is probably what's hardest, and that would be probably be making sure my POV character is true to canon. Everything else is fairly easy for me.

[littlebutfierce]

Yay for getting to the smut! I remember you saying you were struggling w/it.

The sicker I am of reading this particular piece, the longer I leave it.

Yeah, me too. Ahahaha.

[littlebutfierce]

I wrote about 800 words, that may or may not go into this possibly long-ish (for me) futurefic w/my OT3 -- it was pretty bad, even for a 750 Words fic-brain-dump, but some of it might be salvageable.

I edit little things while I go, & things that definitely affect the course of the story (assuming I realize them right away). But I do a lot of editing at the end; I prefer to just get stuff out before I start freaking myself out about how much I need to do to make a story readable. ^^;;;

& hahaha, the leopard!

[jagnikjen]

800 words is awesome. As I've said over and over, written words can be fixed, a blank page can't. And even you don't recognize much or any of it when you're done editing and revising, the act of just writing is always a good thing.

[littlebutfierce]

Hee, thanks!!

[bay_alexison]

Haha, well today I was playing around with Ommwriter and when I tried to open one of my fics the formatting was all wrong. I then copied the second half of the first chapter of the fic and pasted it onto Omwriter and managed to write one part I skipped over. However, I tried opening the document and somehow the file got corrupted. D: Luckily I saved the second half of the chapter through Ommwriter and some of the first half through drop box, but I pretty much lost around a little over 500 words of material that I liked the writing of. -_- I still remember some of the lines I had put, so I was able to rewrite the whole thing, yay. Overall toady I got maybe around 800-900 words (I didn't count as I was pretty much adding in stuff that I skipped over the first time around).

With editing, I might suddenly change a few sentences here and there if I immediately thought of a better may to construct them. I then will do major editing after I get done with the story/chapter. I do get tired after looking through the story a few times, so I would then not worry too much making it perfect and send it to a beta (if I have one) to look over it.

[jagnikjen]

All words count. Really. If they're new words they count. So yay for 800/900 new words and for the editing. It's all part of the process.

[bay_alexison]

LOL, I meant I didn't keep track of the overall word count, but I'm sure I did around 800-900 words. I'm still glad I did that much writing though and I am counting them. :)

[linaewen]

I wrote some notes! And have some more ideas lurking that might turn into something if I give them time to come out into the open. Today I have pretty much the whole day to myself, so I'm going to try to spend it writing and see how much I can get done.

I edit as I go, but also do a final edit after I am finished. Actually, everytime I reread something I've written, I find myself fixing this and that -- usually punctuation. One of the things I do in Real Life is work as a copy editor, so it's natural to be in editing mode most of the time. I don't know that there's an easy vs. hard thing -- but some of the things I have to keep track of when I edit are making sure I don't use the same word too many times too close together, getting POV write, and watching my punctuation. I use way to many dashes and semicolons, so I have to watch that I'm judicious about those. ;-)

I think I do sometimes edit more than I write. It takes me a long time sometimes to move past a section, because I want to get it just write. I find it hard to just write a bunch of stuff and then go back to fix it later; I'd rather get it mostly right the first time, and then just tweak it in a final edit.

[jagnikjen]

A whole day--may it be super productive!

[littlebutfierce]

some of the things I have to keep track of when I edit are making sure I don't use the same word too many times too close together

Me too. I notice this TONS in other people's fic, but it's much harder for me to notice it myself. If I have a vague feeling that I need to watch out for a certain word, I'll ctrl-F around & try & obliterate as many uses as I can, but of course it's the ones I don't notice that get me (hooray for betas!). Sometimes putting the fic into Wordle helps me spot these things--once I learn to block out, say, character names, which invariably come up the biggest.

[curuchamion]

So last night I wrote 915 more words on my story! An important scene, too, even if I can't remember off the bat which one it was (lol). And I scribbled paper-jotted versions of two other important scenes! (Although one of them is going to be moved several years and completely rewritten.)

Is there going to be another check-in post soon?