The Pain of Editing

Perhaps the hardest part of being an author is the lengthy editing process on your manuscripts. It is the most tedious and exhausting part of the writing process in my opinion, and since I'm currently deep in the throes of editing book 2 of the Lily Black Saga, I am reminded of just how annoying it is. It seems that what you first thought was perfect when you were initially writing it, upon your seemingly never ending waves of editing you decide is nothing but trash and should be replaced. It can become very disheartening very quickly if you've spent a great length of time on a certain scene only for you to realize that it needs to be completely rewritten.

Now, that isn't to say that editing isn't good or needed for a book, it is. It is always the editing that makes the book that much better to read and flows smoothly from one theme to the next. If you only had the first draft of a book to read, you would think that it wasn't that good, no matter who wrote it and no matter what the plot was. Comparing my very first draft of The Return of Sinestra to the multiple edited final draft that I send off to the publisher, it's clear that the edits make all the difference to the final outcome. They are what make the manuscript a book.

In reality, for me anyway, the majority of the time I take to write a book is actually spent in the multiple rounds of editing. I can write out the basic idea for the book in a couple months, provided that I have enough time with school and work to do so. But it is the massive amount of editing that transforms a basic manuscript into a finished novel. The first draft is when you just get the idea out onto paper, which can be the hardest part for some people. The editing is where you add more details, fix punctuation mistakes that you made, alter certain scenes completely to fit with the story better, adjust the plot to cover up unintentional holes, etc.

But, in the meantime, the actual process of editing is a serious pain. Probably because as the author ourself, we are our own worst critic when it comes to what we write. We want everything to be perfect, and when we think it isn't, we will change it repeatedly until we believe it is perfect. The thing that we have to remember is that no one is perfect in whatever they do. That's what makes our stories or products interesting to so many people. If there was something that didn't have a flaw in it, then would you really be interested in it? I personally wouldn't be. The flaws show us that no matter how good we are, we are still only human.