Editing really isn't so bad.

Let’s admit it, first drafts are almost always where the love lies. You’ve taken a seed of an idea and you ran with it as fast as you could and as if your life depended on it. We’ve all been there, right?

Sure, of course we have.

Then we’re faced with the dreaded editing process. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never liked pulling out the red pen. It’s a surgical process I invariably weep an internal tear over. But it also has a very valid place in the world. And as much as we may hate to do it, we have to.

We have to because without it we’d more than likely still be treading the same waters we immersed ourselves in the moment the seed of an idea first came to us. We wouldn’t see the (unplanned) flaws in our characters or the stale pacing. More; we probably wouldn’t even see the structural problems stopping the story we want to tell becoming something more than just a first draft idea.

Stephen King once said “write for yourself, and then worry about the audience.”

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

-          Stephen King

That pretty much sums it up for me.

The first draft is always for you, it’s the story you wanted to tell from the start. The second draft (the first revision in my case) is where you start to think about the audience and pick over what works, who’s needed, and what doesn’t.

This happened recently for me while I was editing Season of the wolf. The idea was there and I had the story I wanted to write down and on paper. And as far as I was concerned the whole thing worked. I had everything I wanted to say wrapped up in 50,000 words.

Then, after a three month gap, I came to the editing table. I didn’t see the problems at first, but I could tell there was something, somewhere, that made it fall short of what I imagined it would read like. I was devastated.

I have since pulled out the red pen on three more occasions since and made the whole thing a much tighter story. The downside of course (at least for me) is the culling of various characters I since realized I didn’t need. And do you know what? It was for the best. I killed my darlings and I, along with the story, survived.

Not that the casual reader would ever know once it’s finished, of course. And that’s the point. We may dread the red pen, we may dread the inevitable cull which happens therein, but providing we do the job right the pay-off will be worth it.