Love this analogy. You’re the queen of analogies. If I don’t get into revision mode I will be stuck wordsmithing for 3 hours. I have to follow the Save the Cat format/beat outline otherwise my story would have hills and valleys in all the wrong places and would be a tangent of one event after another.
First of all, I love these posts. And this one makes total sense to me. Yes, artists overwork their work all the time, and it takes all the freshness and energy out of them. So I totally get the goldilocks metaphor, and think it works here. (commenting on your reader's comment below) and it relates to walking your dog because it's hard to find that perfect middle place of comfort. I experience that on my non-mountain walks too. Personally, I'ld love to see all these essays made into a book someday.
Wow! This one really struck home for me. I'm an obsessive reviser for sure. I'm the type who purposely writes the first draft about 20K longer than I want the final version to be to give me plenty of wiggle room to strip it down. One thing I fight hard to resist is going back into it after it has been professionally edited. This is a recipe for introducing late typos, which I've been known to do.
I agree completely about the difficulty in resisting further editing! Part of the difficulty is that every editor & critiquer has their own unique take. In my experience, none of them seem completely happy with a version I've revised according to someone else's wishes.
So true! Editors are as fallible as everyone else. I'd rather an editor catch a mistake like Character A has green eyes on page 23 and blue eyes on page 101 than for the editor to recommend a complete rewrite of the book's climactic scene.
Eye color would be an easy fix, for sure! That said, I've gotten invaluable advice from editors in the past on big-picture concepts, and really learned from them.
Wendy - I really enjoyed this, and I will read it again - but my first-blush reaction is, 'this seems like three stories rolled into one' ... but not clear where they dive is between them because there isn't a venn-drawing sweet spot of overlap between them; I get the anal-writer re-editing their own work (do you have an external editor?); I get the lessons of the dog walk - about being warm enough and mammals needs for being warm feels like a metaphor for things you are feeling but not saying - maybe hiding them a bit in the dog walk stories; and third .... something else I'm not clear on. I expect, as all writers (me too) might explain, "It's complicated", but with the cost of therapy, writing and putting yourself out there is a great remedy. Do you write poetry at all? It's minimalist, stripping our wordy messaging to a skeleton of essentials. I wonder if, buried in your stories there is a 'Wendy's story struggling to get out' story, and if there is, whether you are ready to share it?
You're absolutely right, Mark - this essay just touches the tip of the iceberg on editing, as well as on all sorts of other things! Perhaps it was too much of a stretch to think of revision with a Goldlilocks Zone metaphor, but I do battle constantly with knowing when to stop listening to critiquers/editors and deciding that my manuscript is finished. Thanks for reading!
Clever analogy. As a painter and a writer, I equate the editing process to when I had to stop myself on a painting. At some point, we creatives just have to say, "It's done!" Hee!
Love this analogy. You’re the queen of analogies. If I don’t get into revision mode I will be stuck wordsmithing for 3 hours. I have to follow the Save the Cat format/beat outline otherwise my story would have hills and valleys in all the wrong places and would be a tangent of one event after another.
Thank goodness for STC, right? And thanks for reading, Carissa!
First of all, I love these posts. And this one makes total sense to me. Yes, artists overwork their work all the time, and it takes all the freshness and energy out of them. So I totally get the goldilocks metaphor, and think it works here. (commenting on your reader's comment below) and it relates to walking your dog because it's hard to find that perfect middle place of comfort. I experience that on my non-mountain walks too. Personally, I'ld love to see all these essays made into a book someday.
Thanks so much, Suzy! Your enthusiasm and support mean the world to me.
Wow! This one really struck home for me. I'm an obsessive reviser for sure. I'm the type who purposely writes the first draft about 20K longer than I want the final version to be to give me plenty of wiggle room to strip it down. One thing I fight hard to resist is going back into it after it has been professionally edited. This is a recipe for introducing late typos, which I've been known to do.
I agree completely about the difficulty in resisting further editing! Part of the difficulty is that every editor & critiquer has their own unique take. In my experience, none of them seem completely happy with a version I've revised according to someone else's wishes.
So true! Editors are as fallible as everyone else. I'd rather an editor catch a mistake like Character A has green eyes on page 23 and blue eyes on page 101 than for the editor to recommend a complete rewrite of the book's climactic scene.
Eye color would be an easy fix, for sure! That said, I've gotten invaluable advice from editors in the past on big-picture concepts, and really learned from them.
Wendy - I really enjoyed this, and I will read it again - but my first-blush reaction is, 'this seems like three stories rolled into one' ... but not clear where they dive is between them because there isn't a venn-drawing sweet spot of overlap between them; I get the anal-writer re-editing their own work (do you have an external editor?); I get the lessons of the dog walk - about being warm enough and mammals needs for being warm feels like a metaphor for things you are feeling but not saying - maybe hiding them a bit in the dog walk stories; and third .... something else I'm not clear on. I expect, as all writers (me too) might explain, "It's complicated", but with the cost of therapy, writing and putting yourself out there is a great remedy. Do you write poetry at all? It's minimalist, stripping our wordy messaging to a skeleton of essentials. I wonder if, buried in your stories there is a 'Wendy's story struggling to get out' story, and if there is, whether you are ready to share it?
Cheers,
Mark
You're absolutely right, Mark - this essay just touches the tip of the iceberg on editing, as well as on all sorts of other things! Perhaps it was too much of a stretch to think of revision with a Goldlilocks Zone metaphor, but I do battle constantly with knowing when to stop listening to critiquers/editors and deciding that my manuscript is finished. Thanks for reading!
Clever analogy. As a painter and a writer, I equate the editing process to when I had to stop myself on a painting. At some point, we creatives just have to say, "It's done!" Hee!