I decided that I would finish edits to my project from November by the first of July. I started last week, opening the document and starting from the beginning, going through and line editing and trying to flesh out some things.
It is so painful.
I hate, hate, hate editing my own work. I don't think I'm particularly good at doing it, and the problem is that I always feel "Ugh, I've already read this, I fucking wrote it, how boring." I think if I could set things away for years, then it would be fine, I could edit well. For example: I have these massive three-ring binders hidden away in the bottom of a box of books at my parents' place that has printed-out copies of a ton of shit I wrote through high school and into my freshman year of college. Now, a decade or more (fuck, I'm old) after I've written all that stuff, I can look back on it and not get bogged down.
This was one of my biggest challenges in school, too, especially in college and grad school. In journalism classes I was always told to read through my stuff before I handed it in, but I never could. Not really. It's just so fucking boring, reading what I just did. I got pretty miserable grades on some stuff--my reporting teacher would dock 5 or 10 points for every little thing, like a comma in the wrong place or misspelled word--but I just could never make a habit of reading my stuff well.
Even in grad school, we were supposed to do lots of drafts and edit ourselves, particularly in this final-semester class on long-length narrative nonfiction. That class killed me. I love writing, and I enjoy editing other people's material, but I'm just too close to my own work to self edit.
I guess this isn't a surprise or anything. We're all too close to ourselves, too close to our decisions and lives and what we create, to accurately judge it. But then again, maybe ignorance is bliss. And maybe I'm an awesome genius who churns out Pulitzer prize winning first drafts and shits gold.
(Kidding. Just don't tell my editor I never read my stuff and don't ever intend to. I think just the concept would give her a conniption.)
1 comment:
Have you considered having someone else glance over it? Whenever I'm writing and feel I'm done, I let someone else at it with a red pen. I don't know if that will help or not, but I'm with you- I hate editing my own stuff.
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