Editing is the task that nobody wants to do. No matter how skilled you are as a writer, editing is the hard part. You’ll often hear professional writers say that they spend much more time editing than they do writing. And sometimes that’s true – for certain projects editing can be a real challenge.
So, in this video, I walk through a few steps of the editing process. I write and edit one sentence, just to offer a sense of the considerations that you might want to be attentive to as you approach your own writing. One of the unfortunate consequences of being a student in the academic environment is that you are subliminally taught how to write fast – which is not so good for creative writing. The further along in academia that you go, the quicker you get at writing essays in particular and writing them at the last minute – the night before they are due. That’s a normal student habit. You pick it up if you’re in mainstream education for a long time. Because it works, right? You can dig in and get the whole thing done in a few hours. That works perfectly for regular academic writing. But when it comes to creative writing, much more is required of us. More flexibility, more spontaneity, more creative percolation.
In this video I talk about these challenges and suggest an approach and rhythm to the work of creative writing and editing.