Teaching Myself to Edit

Real writers are voluminous writers. They have completed novels, abandoned novels, and unwritten novels. Never mind writing more than one story in a lifetime or year, they write more than one a month. Sometimes after tens of pages they give up on a story because it turns out to be going nowhere. No doubt many have forgotten so much of what they’ve written they’d not recognize it if it weren’t on their harddrives.

These authors hack out manuscripts well past midnight night after night. I suspect when they pause for thought it’s not to figure out what to write but which way of the many they want to write it. They continue typing through rough patches and lulls, because, really, what else would you do?

1000 Days is still teaching me the same lesson I needed to learn on day one. It’s still teaching me to write something I enjoy and then to ignore it and move on to the next day. This is a difficult lesson. Every idea I have feels like THE idea—too important to cast off after a day or two of exploration. I do it anyway.

It’s time for me to learn to edit.

My pieces here don’t really have the word count to warrant an edit in the sense that I’ll be taking a first draft to the second draft stage, but I’ll have to make do with what I can. Saturdays I will reach back about 100 days for editing fodder.

Tomorrow I’ll be digging into…

Day 104: Bunbun of the Veleme

Word count: 264
Day 205