Thursday, September 8, 2011

Editing, my way!

Well yes! Editing the thing I suck at most. And why? Because I dislike it. And the why I dislike editing is; I tend to make many spelling & grammatical errors, and because of this I've do do a lot of corrections. The drawback of having to correct so much and not having the money to pay someone to do the brunt of correcting, is that it slows me down in finishing my books.

I love the creative process of coming up with a story and writing it down. I write a story down fast, but my editing always lags behind. When you do something with passion you will always do it better and the time will fly by like it was done yesterday. Without the passion things will drag and seem to last an eternity.

I'm trailing off. I didn't want to rant about my dislike of editing but I wanted to write about how I edit. This is what I do. I quickly go over the text, sentence by sentence, correcting the simple spelling errors. When I finish doing that I'll go over the text again, and correct the sentence structure. I also do this on the sentence level. I'll repeat doing this till I'm satisfied with the text. I'm no spelling God, when I'm satisfied there probably are many errors still left in.

It takes me as long to edit a novel as it takes me to write one. I'm slow like that. I can't do much about it. Well I could become better and more diligent in my spelling & grammar, that might do the trick, but that takes time and experience. I can live with the slowness for now, but I discovered something else that's wrong with my editing. By doing my correcting per sentence the flow of the whole get distorted at times and my text will read clumsily because of it. (More than it should)

Driving home (I do a lot of thinking driving) I thought about my editing woes, and I came up with that maybe I should correct my work taking into account the whole paragraph. That way I can make sure the whole reads okay, and that not each sentence stands on its own unrelated to those surrounding it. I'll try this new way out and hope that it will improve the readability of my writing.

In fact I'll start with this blog-post.

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