(no subject)

[nny]

Today I have written about 1,000 words - so far - of a pretty terrible Losers fic. The concept amuses me and there are loads of parts I've written in different places that are genuinely good, but the text as a whole is so very A to B that it's come out incredibly dull. I suppose this is where editing comes in, but I have a horrible tendency to slash and burn in these things, to believe that the whole thing is useless and must be started again, and I don't have the heart to do that. It doesn't seem worth it. I'm going to finish it, anyway, before I make any decisions, and then I shall probably beg for help.

If you write, how do you edit? What is your process? I've never really learned how to do it.

Comments

[vivien]

When I am done, I go back through looking for easy grammar stuff first - punctuation, repeated words, etc. Then I look for content and sense. And I repeat as often as needed.

[nny]

I find it hard to divorce myself from the writing enough to do this, often. I guess that's where betas come in, of course. :D

[siegeofangels]

IDK, I read through it a bunch of times looking for things that leap out. Also I kind of try to read it with a more critical eye, like looking for themes or whatnot. I'll get a bunch of index cards and make one for each scene, writing down roughly what happens and what theme(s) it supports, and then I line up all of the cards on the floor and/or color-code them so I can see if I need to support particular themes more or if there's something that just doesn't go with the rest of it.

Like, for Kiss The Sky (the SGA fraternitas au), the notecards said which relationship each scene was about so I could make sure that the John/Rodney scenes weren't all bunched up together.

For I Don't Think You're Ready, there were more themes/things I wanted to have in the story, so making notecards really helped me see, oh, I need another scene to support THIS particular theme, or which scenes in my hockey story did not have enough hockey in them.

These stories were both like 8k, though, so I'm not sure how well it would work for stories of much shorter or longer length.

[nny]

That sounds like what I want to move towards, definitely! Do you write stories with particular themes in mind for them? I tend to think more about what happens and who it happens to, rather than why it happens and what the overarching themes are, which is probably some explanation as to why my fiction is relatively weak.

[siegeofangels]

Haha, I definitely do not have themes in mind for my stories, I tend to just write a bunch of scenes (the movie trailer of the story, basically, because those are all of the fun parts). It's only later when I do the notecard thing that I realize, oh, huh, this story seems to basically be about body image, or John finding balance, so I should make sure I resolve that.

I am terrible terrible terrible with plot which is why nothing much happens in my stories.

If you want I can take a look at your story and see if I pick out stuff, but I think it might not be my fandom so I might miss stuff. /o\

[skygiants]

When I'm writing, I have a habit -- good or bad -- of starting out by rereading everything I've already written and making tweaks, so there's always sort of an ongoing editing process. Then I send it out to betas with a cry of "PLEASE HELP!" and then I make a second pass, and that's usually about it, unless I write myself into a corner that I can't get out of, in which case I usually mass delete back to the last part I felt good about and start writing it again from there. But that is a DRASTIC MEASURE that I hope not to have to resort to too often.

[nny]

I find that I get so caught up in the minutiae that I don't end up getting anything finished if I edit as I go. How do you avoid that?

[genarti]

Mine is pretty similar to Becca's! (Except for the mass deleting. I do that once in a while, but I always save it as a different draft, because I'm paranoid about not losing big chunks of work because WHAT IF I WANT TO USE SOME OF THAT LATER. I'm not sure I've ever actually repurposed any significant amount of a cut scene -- usually, if I've cut it, it needed to be cut -- but I always want to have the option.)

Sometimes, if I'm really not sure about how a story's working, I'll print it out and read it in hard copy. That makes me look at it a different way than reading it on the screen does, for some reason. If I'm not sure about the structure, sometimes I just stare it a lot and wave my hands around and send it to a beta friend going HELP, I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANY MORE, but sometimes I also will go back and re-outline and see how that looks.

[nny]

Ooh, I like the idea of printing it out; maybe I'll hijack the library's relatively cheap printing service to do that. It'd probably be easier to annotate drafts by hand.