The Trees are a Mess

After a full-day flow-state marathon, I’ve finished the first editing pass of the new book. It feels great to put down the red pen for a while.

Usually, the first pass is just cleaning up the roughness of the first draft. I happen to think my first drafts are particularly rough, and I know I’m not the only author who thinks that way about their writing. But apparently I’m an evil taskmaster who sets impossible standards and deadlines for myself. I’m healthy that way.

With the first editing pass, I don’t usually spend a lot of time working with pacing, or plot or character development, or any of the big-picture stuff. I’ve found it difficult to do that when the text of the current draft is a mess of grammatical and other errors. It’s like I can’t see the forest because a bunch of the trees are such a god-awful mess that it’s distracting. Like I said, healthy, right?

Because I’m very tactile, or maybe because I secretly hate trees, I do all my editing by printing out a draft and then going at it with a red pen. For some reason, doing editing on a screen doesn’t work for my strange little brain. The next step, then, is to open up the manuscript in Word (spits) and make all my red-pen edits in the on-screen version. That part is long and tedious, but it does give me yet another opportunity to make even more edits, which is also healthy. I think.

By this point, you may be thinking that my process of turning a first draft into a final book is long, convoluted, tedious, and possibly deranged. I can’t say I’d disagree.

Still, as long as I’m satisfied with the end result, I’m satisfied with the process. Although I doubt the trees are super happy about it.