An Editorial Eye

Here's a question... how much should you edit yourself when you write?

On the one hand, when you're trying to get something started, your inner censor can be your worst enemy. You try to put something down, and nothing seems good enough. And then you get it into your head that you simply can't continue from such inauspicious beginnings; nothing good could ever come of it! The way to get around this has been repeated by writers since time immemorial... just put down anything. Any old crap. The important part is the process of writing, of getting stuff from brain to page. If you can shut off that inner censor, forgo any kind of editorial process, then you can actually get things done.

But when do you start to get critical? Do you power on through until you've reached some kind of end? Or do you catch yourself as you go, dancing back and forth between sentences and paragraphs, not letting yourself go on until you've cornered that perfect turn of phrase?

There's something to be said for perfectionism. For the longest time, my writing strategy was just to go without pause. And it worked very well for me, especially with creative writing. I could feel the flow of the story as I was writing it, and to interrupt that would just completely derail me. So it was all or nothing, and the end result was usually passable.

But 'passable' shouldn't really ever be good enough, right? Reading back on some of my papers from college there are plenty of examples of awfully-constructed sentences; torturously-winding things that start out in one thought and end in quite another. Because that's what happens when you have no editorial process! There's got to be some give and take.

So I'm trying something new. Maybe it's possible to incorporate some measure of editorial rigour into the flow of writing. It's a purely mental thing, like seeing the schooner in the magic-eye picture... let yourself get swept along in the flow while maintaining enough of a distance to swim a little upstream every now and then.

Basically, I'm trying to find the happy medium between being able to write, and being able to write well. Because sure, I could put any old crap on the page, and maybe that's exactly what I need to get back into writing after something of a hiatus. But I think the key difference - one that I'm only really starting to learn - lies in being discerning enough to realise what's drivel and what isn't even as you're putting it down. Editing on the fly seems like a pretty good exercise in making that distinction.

Hummmm, maybe I'm not explaining this well. Maybe I'm skipping a step! First figure out how to get your thoughts down, then figure out how to make the words all fancy-like. To be honest, the difference seems pretty vague when you get too close.

Alright, enough introspection. Next time I'll try something fictional!

The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out