Never resist editing. Your writing isn’t etched in stone and can always be improved for the reader. Some of you are now throwing stones, and type hate emails for me. I know, I hate editing just as much as any other writer, but fact is, it must be done, so you might as well drop that stone and get editing. Think about it this way: If your writing is as perfect as you think it is already, than editing well only make it that much better, right?
Why do you resist writing? Fear? Fear of what? Maybe you ought to write a story about a writer with a phobia of editing. Point out how crazy his phobia is and how it disrupts his writing career. This’ll do wonders for changing the way you edit your stories.
If you really have a problem with editing, there are people whose job it is to edit your work… they are known as: editors. Editors are not a thing to fear. Editors are people who love books just as much as you do, and they want to see a great piece of fiction get printed. So wither you do your own editing or you get an editor to do it for you, never resist the art of editing. Your readers well be glad you did.
I have a tendency to edit so much that it’s never finished…
My biggest problem is I kepp rewriting everything… I find new things to add or stuff to take out… I end up with a totally differant book than the one I started out with!
~EK
… And good writing is good writing no matter where it happens. The good news about online publishing is that edits are FAST! The bad news is that it’s so tempting to send an email, post a blog entry, or even (oops!) update a corporate website without spending AT LEAST the same amount of time editing as one would do with pen and paper, er, that is, with computer screen and hard-copy draft. I wish it weren’t so, but even the “small stuff” like typos and grammatical errors will hurt you. Yes. They will. So check, check, re-check… and then ask someone ELSE to check. (my two-cents’ worth….)
that’s sooo true! when I’m doing a manuscript, I always run it through spell check as soon as I get done, because never haveing gone to school, I also never learned to either spell or type, and that is a big problem for me. As a result I have more than 10 differant spell checking software programs installed on my computer, and as I edit and re-edit my manuscripts I run each draft through a differant spell checker, eventually after about 7 or 8 drafts it well have gone through all of them.
~EK