A great comment was left on one of my other blog posts recently. Good ol' Angie Kate said that editing is much less fun and much more time consuming than writing, but equally necessary.
She's right, of course, but I wish she wasn't. I'm not a big fan of the re-writing, because it seems like it takes gobs and gobs of effort and concentration to produce a couple of ounces of tangible, realized outcome.
However, in the early stages of my editing/re-writing of my work in progress, I've begun to realize the dividends. Polished copy is much (so much) better than that rough, thorny stuff I first threw out there when I was hammering out the first draft.
There are the points where I'm really ticked at myself for writing what I see as a rotten sentence, and it takes me 45 minutes to rehash the mess around it. Like that one rancid sentence infected all the other ones around it, and now I have to send in the clean-up crew for the whole dang paragraph. Sigh.
Sure, the process is painstaking, and I totally (and I mean totally) agree with Angie Kate's assessment, but I'm still going through it with as much zeal as I can. I don't like it as much as the writing, but I know that it's making me a better writer in the long run.
It took me a little bit to warm up to it, and I'm not exactly cozy yet, but I see the importance. So I'm teaching myself to love it. After all, I know I'll be more happy with the overall project when I go back and read it again.
I completely understand, good sir. Writing is wonderful. Editing is simply necessary. We can't do without it, though, just as we can't do without the women in our lives. (Whether they be blog friends who make particularly apropos comments or otherwise...)
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