Surprises in Editing

When I'm writing, I always listen to music. Sometimes I'll put the iPod (or iPhone) on shuffle and just see where the music takes me. Other times I'll make a choice and listen to one particular artist (to be honest, Josh Ritter and Iron & Wine get the most play time). The music helps keep things flowing, it gives my brain something to hold onto in the background to block out all those other things, other possible distractions. This need began in college and to this time I have a hard time listening to Mazzy Star or Portishead without thinking about writing major papers my senior year. I'm completely serious.

Sometimes the music will help draw me into an emotional place that suits the writing and other times it will draw me out of an emotional place that contradicts the work.

But either way, I find it incredibly difficult to write without music.

I thought the same would be true when it came to serious editing. I was wrong.

I sat down at the end of last week to begin editing in earnest the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year. I had a great deal of work to do on it after November and I hadn't fleshed out the entire story arc until July (I had written out where the Point A to Point B, I just needed to expand). For August and most of September I have let it sit. I haven't read it, I haven't written more, I haven't touched it.

But lately, the characters have been hanging out more (not unlike Matthew Norman describes "the men upstairs" in his quite wonderful novel Domestic Violets). I've run into them while walking about town, they've wandered into my dreams, filled my thoughts, invaded my little world. I knew it was time to get back to work.

I sat down in my office this time instead of the library where I'll normally do my writing at home. I opened up my fancypants new writing software to utilize some of the character/places/research options, a highlighter, a pen, some liquid paper, and the printed copy of the 200+ manuscript I had labored over for so long. (It's always been an easier experience for me to edit pen to paper, especially on a first draft edit.)

Sitting down at my desk, the first thing I did was open up iTunes and began a shuffling playlist. Three paragraphs in, I had to turn it off. I couldn't concentrate. I required absolute silence.

Editing is a completely different beast, at least for me, than writing. I know that, but somehow I needed to be reminded. After 20 some pages, I started to see new things about my writing, things I've never noticed before. Apparently I have a tendency (especially in dialogue) to being with the word "so." Who knew?

I've gotten through the first 50 pages by now and it's shown me a great deal. I'm using this as an opportunity to clean up the text, really flesh out the character notes, identify any inconsistencies, look for any themes I didn't know were in there as I plowed through the first 50,000+ words in November.

One of my favorite things about editing? The time disappears in a different way than it does when you're writing. Hours vanished in the space it took to get through only a few pages.

Another really awesome thing were those times where I would write down something I wanted to see next (a line of dialogue, an observation) and then, when I actually got to the next line, I would discover the previous me had already put those exact same words down. That was incredibly cool.

My goal is to get through a major edit by the end of October and then take November to write something completely new.

It's going to be an exciting fall!