Writing Myths – Myth #2

As I’m working away on my new novel, I’m learning there is advice out there that might not be everything it seems on the surface. Over the next few posts, I will debunk some of the myths I’m facing during this process.

Myth Number 2: Don’t edit while you write.

For over a week, I was really, really on a roll. Thousand words a day, no problem.  Then, suddenly and seemingly without cause, I dreaded the idea of going back to my draft. This premise has been my obsession, my passion. What could cause this story to be the bane of my existence, seemingly overnight?

The answer was my unquestioning adherence to Myth #2. Still in the NaNoWriMo mindset, I firmly believed I would only lose ground if I went back and edited—nay, looked at—anything I had written. I was running down the dark corridor of a maze as the lights snap off behind me as I moved forward, the only direction available. But the problem with that was that I couldn’t go back and see if I had missed a crucial turn along the way. So I just kept getting more and more lost, and feeling more and more helpless because—as I clung to my rules, feeling deviation would cause me to fail—I had no clear ability to find my way again.

(And I could feel Future Elly getting pissed at all the clean-up she’d have to do during the editing stage.)

After a lot of long showers and laying awake in bed, I realized that the problem was that I had started at the book in the wrong place. I had skipped set-up and went directly into conflict. I hadn’t drawn the arrow back all the way, so my characters didn’t have enough trajectory to carry the rest of the book. If I had stayed dogged to the “rule” of not editing (and just going with it), I would have continued to struggle because I was building on an unstable foundation.

A Better Way: Structural editing is A-Okay. In the Twin Peaks pilot, there is a scene where an aspiring teen writer asks her older sister Donna, “Which do you like better: ‘The blossom of the evening’? Or ‘the full flower of the evening’?”

Watching it last night, I thought to myself, If that girl is writing a novel, she is NEVER going to finish. A haiku, maybe. But when you’re writing the big’uns, you can’t afford to stop your first draft progress by lingering over word choice like that. You take care of that in the second or third draft stage, but to worry about it before then, you’re going to lose the precious momentum that allows you to figure out the bigger problems of plot and character during the first draft stage.

So the “rule” stands at a copyediting and proofreading type level. But as for structural editing, it’s a must, and it can't happen early enough. You have to go back and at least skim what has come before, because—unless you are way more organized than your typical creative personality, or a genius (plenty of sins can be forgiven if you're a genius)—you’re going to forget things, confuse yourself, and/or end up with an inconsistent mess.

An example: When I worked in publishing, I content-edited a thriller that went on to sell quite well. But I’ll let you know in on a secret. It was the second in a two-book deal for this author; if not for that, it would have gone in the rejection pile. There were significant plot holes, including that he killed off one his main characters, then brought her back to life! How do you miss something like that? This probably happened because he was moving in a forward trajectory only. I can’t tell you the editing work and rewriting that went into getting that book ready for publication. A lot of it could have been saved if the author went back to do some structural editing as he drafted.

So while you don’t want to get hung up on what kind of flower your evening is, you do want to keep the light on behind you. Think of this as making switchbacks. You can see the path you just came from, but as you seemingly moving backwards, you’re really moving upwards.

See you at the top of the mountain!