Day 353: Figured out my self-editing issues!
I got to work late today again, but not for lack of earnest trying.
My attempts to get up earlier failed, but not because I went to bed late. Last night, I went to bed on time, but then simply lay in bed instead of going to sleep. Then today I got up at the same time as yesterday, which was later than I wanted. Sigh. I probably could have done an extra couple hours of work last night instead of lying in bed awake.
Then, besides my messed up waking schedule, I also had several house chores and cooking dinner prep to do as part of clearing the decks. But that took a lot longer than I had expected and so my clearing the decks ritual took an extra hour.
This made me start thinking about rearranging my schedule. There are certain things I absolutely have to do before work, such as exercise and my Japanese flashcards, because otherwise, neither of those will get done at all. But I wonder if I can put off my house chores until later in the day and do them in between writing sessions, or after my last writing session?
I had originally done them before work because the thought of doing them would bother me as I was working, and nag at me to get them done. But lately I’ve been practicing more intense focus and concentration as I’m working, so I’m finding myself less distracted by stray thoughts like that. I wonder if I could do my work without being bothered by my unfinished chores, and then get to them later?
Of course, there’s also the chance that the chores would be just like my exercise and Japanese flashcards, and they’re the type of things I won’t get them done if I don’t do them before work. I don’t know if they’re like that or not. I guess I should try it and see if I can do my house chores later in the day. That way I can get started on my work sooner after I wake up. As it is now, I take up half the day on non-work things. It would be nice if I can cut that time down a bit.
It shouldn’t be such a big deal to start work a bit late, but I’ve been noticing that when I start work later after I wake up, my brain and body are just a bit more tired. I would ideally like to be able to do my writing work when my brain is freshest. Later in the day, my brain is more tired and I’m more easily distracted. It’s very frustrating, but I don’t know what else I can do about it besides try to rearrange my work so that I get it done when I’m feeling best.
So I guess tomorrow I’ll try to put off my house chores until later so that I can get to work faster.
***
Today I’m still reading book 2 of my Regency series, doing light edits if I see anything wonky but otherwise just reading to get back into the story. I started reading the beginning of book 2 yesterday after finishing book 1, and one thing I noticed is that again, the start of the book has more issues than later. This was a bit confusing to me until I thought back to my writing process back then.
After finishing book 1, I jumped right into starting book 2. I wrote a couple chapters, but it was at that point that I realized I didn’t have a good handle on character arcs and the way plot threads were headed. Everything was just loose threads, but I hadn’t planned their development and growth, or when or how they would be resolved. I realized that I needed to do more detailed outlining of the rest of the books in the series to plan those loose threads. That way I could know what aspects of the arcs to plot for each book.
So I stopped writing book 2 to do the Snowflake method of plotting on all the books in the series. I’m very glad I did that because I got a much better handle on all the books.
But when going back to writing book 2, I had to pick up the text that I had written before. This of course involved editing of what I’d written before, my weakest point. In doing some light editing now, I can see the passages I had spent so much time editing when I began writing book 2 again, and they’re still rather rough.
My theory is that I have two fundamental problems when starting a book. I have a feeling it was the problem with the beginnings of both book 1 and book 2, and probably book 3 as well.
The first problem relates to how I always have problems starting a scene. I’m dumped onto a blank page and I have to make a decision how to start. I think that I have the same issue when I’m starting a book. I know where I need to go, but I still have to make a decision about how to get the story moving. I know that I’m very slow and not very good at decision making, so that decision usually involves starting the book, changing my mind, rewriting or revising stuff I’ve already written, changing my mind again, etc. It makes for a rather messy start to the book.
The second problem is that when I started books 1 and 2, I had written stuff via vomit writing, which tended to be more rambling and redundant (when I say redundant, I mean saying the same concept or idea but in a different way). Later, when I did the self-editing, I was reluctant to cut much of that stuff. Instead I rearranged and reworded things to make them clear, but I still ended up keeping most of what I’d written.
I think this was a mistake. When doing the self-editing, I should have instead tried to rewrite entire passages rather than tweak and rearrange sentences.
I think that if I’d been editing-as-I-go, as I did with the Hawaii book, I probably wouldn’t have done this. I wouldn’t have been vomit writing, for one thing, and so the passages wouldn’t have been so rambling and redundant. I’d have been more apt to cut phrases and sentences and rewrite them (which is what I noticed I did a lot when writing the Hawaii book). I wouldn’t have had to rely on the self-editing pass in order to tighten the writing, because I’d have been instead doing it as I was writing.
So those are my two (theorized) issues: 1) The beginning of the story is a mess because I suck at making decisions about how to start it, and 2) my vomit writing is rambling and redundant, which makes the beginning of the book even worse, and my self-editing failed to cut and rewrite much of that stuff.
It’s a bit frustrating, but trying to cut and rewrite passages now would be too much work because my self-editing is not good enough to be able to do that well at this stage, after the manuscript has been written. Maybe I’m only making excuses, but I also know myself very well now, after a year of doing this daily writing blog and recording my thoughts and feelings on different aspects of my writing routines and processes.
My self-editing on a completed manuscript is only adequate. The way my brain is wired, I simply can’t focus on details when self-editing like I can when I’m writing.
And here’s something I only just realized right now: when self-editing, I see large-scale—plot points, characterization, pacing, etc. I’m in this large-scale mindset because I’m looking for errors in the writing (i.e., making sure my timeline was correct, making sure I tied up a thread I left loose, looking for words or phrases I might have used too recently and trying to come up with alternatives, looking at the pacing of the scene, making sure what I wrote is clear and not misunderstood, etc.).
Rewriting messy, rambling, or redundant passages requires flipping a switch to a different mindset, a more detail-oriented mindset that I have when writing, and I’ve already discovered that I don’t switch mindsets very easily or very quickly. So when I’m self-editing, that switch often doesn’t happen.
Later in book 1, the writing became less rambling and less redundant (although not always), even though I was still mostly vomit writing. I think it’s because I had a better handle on the plot and the pacing and so I was writing quickly and with more focused purpose. I knew what had to happen and when. I knew where my characters had to go. With less rambling and less redundant writing, the writing was cleaner and there was less for me to have to fix when doing my initial self-editing pass. So later in the book, my writing is not as messy as the beginning of the book.
Well blogging all that took a lot longer than I expected, and right after I said I wanted to get started on my work sooner!!!
But I think this was really, really good stuff! I think I’ve finally started to figure out why my self-editing is so bad:
1) Especially at the beginning of a book, the writing is messy because I have to make decisions about how to start and I often change my mind because I’m poor at making decisions.
2) My vomit writing tends to be rambling and redundant (saying the same idea or concept but in a different way)
3) When I’m self-editing, I tend to be in a large-scale mindset as I look for problems, but I would need to switch to a more detail-oriented mindset in order to do the cutting and rewriting of my messy, rambling, or redundant prose.
4) I have difficulty switching mindsets, so I end up not doing the necessary cutting and rewriting.
I feel like I’ve finally solved a really important problem! I even know why I have a hard time doing the self-editing in a more detailed mindset—because it’s really hard. Even when writing my Hawaii book, which had me in that detailed mindset, I felt tired after only 3 hours and I usually had to push to write more than that.
Also realistically, I don’t have time to go over my book in that detailed mindset again. My average working pace when writing the Hawaii book was about 450 words per hour. Even if doing detailed self-editing is a bit faster, it wouldn’t be more than, say, double that at 900 words per hour, but it might be as slow as 600 words per hour. Also, I still wouldn’t be able to do more than 3 or 4 (maybe 5) hours a day. So doing the self-editing on the Regency books again would be tiring, plus it would take almost the same amount of time it took to write the book.
I don’t have time to devote to that. I need to write the rest of the series, and it isn’t as if the first 3 books are terrible. In re-reading book 1, I noticed that it certainly didn’t require an intensive rewrite or anything like that. Any changes that a more intensive self-editing would have made would have been minor—a few words changed or rearranged in each paragraph. Nothing like huge chunks of writing that needed to be rewritten.
So I think I’ll give up my intention to do a more detailed edit of the first 3 Regency novels. I had already kind of decided on that when I had to reread them in order to start writing book 4, but now I actually know why I’ll be giving up the edit. And I actually know why, now, the self-editing is so hard for me! And I know why I dislike it so much! It’s a lot more mentally exhausting than I would expect it to be, especially if I was unconsciously trying to switch mindsets from large-scale to detail-oriented and back again, over and over, and so of course I’d procrastinate doing it.
This also reinforces my earlier decision to change my writing style. I’ll be editing as I’m writing and paying more attention to the detail of the sentence phrasing, word choice, and rhythm, so it won’t matter if I’m in a large-scale mindset while editing it later. I’ll also be less rambling and less redundant, since I’ll be focused on writing the exact words I want rather than just trying to get any words down.
***
I’m almost finished reading book 2 and I can tell that the writing is perhaps less rambling and less redundant than book 1. But I also noticed that there were more errors that I had missed when I did the last self-editing pass—a few wrong words here and there, a conversation that happened indoors when it should have been outdoors, etc. Ugh! I’m so embarrassed! They weren’t things that my proofreader would necessarily have noticed, but they were things I should have fixed before publishing.
It’s because I didn’t do a very good job on my last self-editing pass. Instead of doing a last read-through from beginning to end, it was a patchy self-editing method that jumped from scene to scene, so I failed to see some continuity errors.
***
I forgot to post this yesterday, so I’m posting this on Friday instead. I worked through the time I would normally stop work and read, so I didn’t read much yesterday. I might spend a bit more time reading today to refill the creative well. But I did get a lot of editing done yesterday and I’m almost done with book 2.
Outlining: time spent: 0
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 6 hours, 11 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: n/a
Writing: Overall writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 58 minutes
My takeaway for today: In order to try to get started on work sooner when my brain is less tired, try doing house chores after work and see if the thought of the unfinished chores bother me or not while I’m working.
My second takeaway for today: I figured out why my self-editing is so bad and why I dislike it so much! It also reinforces my decision to change to a slower, more deliberate writing style that edits as I write.
My attempts to get up earlier failed, but not because I went to bed late. Last night, I went to bed on time, but then simply lay in bed instead of going to sleep. Then today I got up at the same time as yesterday, which was later than I wanted. Sigh. I probably could have done an extra couple hours of work last night instead of lying in bed awake.
Then, besides my messed up waking schedule, I also had several house chores and cooking dinner prep to do as part of clearing the decks. But that took a lot longer than I had expected and so my clearing the decks ritual took an extra hour.
This made me start thinking about rearranging my schedule. There are certain things I absolutely have to do before work, such as exercise and my Japanese flashcards, because otherwise, neither of those will get done at all. But I wonder if I can put off my house chores until later in the day and do them in between writing sessions, or after my last writing session?
I had originally done them before work because the thought of doing them would bother me as I was working, and nag at me to get them done. But lately I’ve been practicing more intense focus and concentration as I’m working, so I’m finding myself less distracted by stray thoughts like that. I wonder if I could do my work without being bothered by my unfinished chores, and then get to them later?
Of course, there’s also the chance that the chores would be just like my exercise and Japanese flashcards, and they’re the type of things I won’t get them done if I don’t do them before work. I don’t know if they’re like that or not. I guess I should try it and see if I can do my house chores later in the day. That way I can get started on my work sooner after I wake up. As it is now, I take up half the day on non-work things. It would be nice if I can cut that time down a bit.
It shouldn’t be such a big deal to start work a bit late, but I’ve been noticing that when I start work later after I wake up, my brain and body are just a bit more tired. I would ideally like to be able to do my writing work when my brain is freshest. Later in the day, my brain is more tired and I’m more easily distracted. It’s very frustrating, but I don’t know what else I can do about it besides try to rearrange my work so that I get it done when I’m feeling best.
So I guess tomorrow I’ll try to put off my house chores until later so that I can get to work faster.
***
Today I’m still reading book 2 of my Regency series, doing light edits if I see anything wonky but otherwise just reading to get back into the story. I started reading the beginning of book 2 yesterday after finishing book 1, and one thing I noticed is that again, the start of the book has more issues than later. This was a bit confusing to me until I thought back to my writing process back then.
After finishing book 1, I jumped right into starting book 2. I wrote a couple chapters, but it was at that point that I realized I didn’t have a good handle on character arcs and the way plot threads were headed. Everything was just loose threads, but I hadn’t planned their development and growth, or when or how they would be resolved. I realized that I needed to do more detailed outlining of the rest of the books in the series to plan those loose threads. That way I could know what aspects of the arcs to plot for each book.
So I stopped writing book 2 to do the Snowflake method of plotting on all the books in the series. I’m very glad I did that because I got a much better handle on all the books.
But when going back to writing book 2, I had to pick up the text that I had written before. This of course involved editing of what I’d written before, my weakest point. In doing some light editing now, I can see the passages I had spent so much time editing when I began writing book 2 again, and they’re still rather rough.
My theory is that I have two fundamental problems when starting a book. I have a feeling it was the problem with the beginnings of both book 1 and book 2, and probably book 3 as well.
The first problem relates to how I always have problems starting a scene. I’m dumped onto a blank page and I have to make a decision how to start. I think that I have the same issue when I’m starting a book. I know where I need to go, but I still have to make a decision about how to get the story moving. I know that I’m very slow and not very good at decision making, so that decision usually involves starting the book, changing my mind, rewriting or revising stuff I’ve already written, changing my mind again, etc. It makes for a rather messy start to the book.
The second problem is that when I started books 1 and 2, I had written stuff via vomit writing, which tended to be more rambling and redundant (when I say redundant, I mean saying the same concept or idea but in a different way). Later, when I did the self-editing, I was reluctant to cut much of that stuff. Instead I rearranged and reworded things to make them clear, but I still ended up keeping most of what I’d written.
I think this was a mistake. When doing the self-editing, I should have instead tried to rewrite entire passages rather than tweak and rearrange sentences.
I think that if I’d been editing-as-I-go, as I did with the Hawaii book, I probably wouldn’t have done this. I wouldn’t have been vomit writing, for one thing, and so the passages wouldn’t have been so rambling and redundant. I’d have been more apt to cut phrases and sentences and rewrite them (which is what I noticed I did a lot when writing the Hawaii book). I wouldn’t have had to rely on the self-editing pass in order to tighten the writing, because I’d have been instead doing it as I was writing.
So those are my two (theorized) issues: 1) The beginning of the story is a mess because I suck at making decisions about how to start it, and 2) my vomit writing is rambling and redundant, which makes the beginning of the book even worse, and my self-editing failed to cut and rewrite much of that stuff.
It’s a bit frustrating, but trying to cut and rewrite passages now would be too much work because my self-editing is not good enough to be able to do that well at this stage, after the manuscript has been written. Maybe I’m only making excuses, but I also know myself very well now, after a year of doing this daily writing blog and recording my thoughts and feelings on different aspects of my writing routines and processes.
My self-editing on a completed manuscript is only adequate. The way my brain is wired, I simply can’t focus on details when self-editing like I can when I’m writing.
And here’s something I only just realized right now: when self-editing, I see large-scale—plot points, characterization, pacing, etc. I’m in this large-scale mindset because I’m looking for errors in the writing (i.e., making sure my timeline was correct, making sure I tied up a thread I left loose, looking for words or phrases I might have used too recently and trying to come up with alternatives, looking at the pacing of the scene, making sure what I wrote is clear and not misunderstood, etc.).
Rewriting messy, rambling, or redundant passages requires flipping a switch to a different mindset, a more detail-oriented mindset that I have when writing, and I’ve already discovered that I don’t switch mindsets very easily or very quickly. So when I’m self-editing, that switch often doesn’t happen.
Later in book 1, the writing became less rambling and less redundant (although not always), even though I was still mostly vomit writing. I think it’s because I had a better handle on the plot and the pacing and so I was writing quickly and with more focused purpose. I knew what had to happen and when. I knew where my characters had to go. With less rambling and less redundant writing, the writing was cleaner and there was less for me to have to fix when doing my initial self-editing pass. So later in the book, my writing is not as messy as the beginning of the book.
Well blogging all that took a lot longer than I expected, and right after I said I wanted to get started on my work sooner!!!
But I think this was really, really good stuff! I think I’ve finally started to figure out why my self-editing is so bad:
1) Especially at the beginning of a book, the writing is messy because I have to make decisions about how to start and I often change my mind because I’m poor at making decisions.
2) My vomit writing tends to be rambling and redundant (saying the same idea or concept but in a different way)
3) When I’m self-editing, I tend to be in a large-scale mindset as I look for problems, but I would need to switch to a more detail-oriented mindset in order to do the cutting and rewriting of my messy, rambling, or redundant prose.
4) I have difficulty switching mindsets, so I end up not doing the necessary cutting and rewriting.
I feel like I’ve finally solved a really important problem! I even know why I have a hard time doing the self-editing in a more detailed mindset—because it’s really hard. Even when writing my Hawaii book, which had me in that detailed mindset, I felt tired after only 3 hours and I usually had to push to write more than that.
Also realistically, I don’t have time to go over my book in that detailed mindset again. My average working pace when writing the Hawaii book was about 450 words per hour. Even if doing detailed self-editing is a bit faster, it wouldn’t be more than, say, double that at 900 words per hour, but it might be as slow as 600 words per hour. Also, I still wouldn’t be able to do more than 3 or 4 (maybe 5) hours a day. So doing the self-editing on the Regency books again would be tiring, plus it would take almost the same amount of time it took to write the book.
I don’t have time to devote to that. I need to write the rest of the series, and it isn’t as if the first 3 books are terrible. In re-reading book 1, I noticed that it certainly didn’t require an intensive rewrite or anything like that. Any changes that a more intensive self-editing would have made would have been minor—a few words changed or rearranged in each paragraph. Nothing like huge chunks of writing that needed to be rewritten.
So I think I’ll give up my intention to do a more detailed edit of the first 3 Regency novels. I had already kind of decided on that when I had to reread them in order to start writing book 4, but now I actually know why I’ll be giving up the edit. And I actually know why, now, the self-editing is so hard for me! And I know why I dislike it so much! It’s a lot more mentally exhausting than I would expect it to be, especially if I was unconsciously trying to switch mindsets from large-scale to detail-oriented and back again, over and over, and so of course I’d procrastinate doing it.
This also reinforces my earlier decision to change my writing style. I’ll be editing as I’m writing and paying more attention to the detail of the sentence phrasing, word choice, and rhythm, so it won’t matter if I’m in a large-scale mindset while editing it later. I’ll also be less rambling and less redundant, since I’ll be focused on writing the exact words I want rather than just trying to get any words down.
***
I’m almost finished reading book 2 and I can tell that the writing is perhaps less rambling and less redundant than book 1. But I also noticed that there were more errors that I had missed when I did the last self-editing pass—a few wrong words here and there, a conversation that happened indoors when it should have been outdoors, etc. Ugh! I’m so embarrassed! They weren’t things that my proofreader would necessarily have noticed, but they were things I should have fixed before publishing.
It’s because I didn’t do a very good job on my last self-editing pass. Instead of doing a last read-through from beginning to end, it was a patchy self-editing method that jumped from scene to scene, so I failed to see some continuity errors.
***
I forgot to post this yesterday, so I’m posting this on Friday instead. I worked through the time I would normally stop work and read, so I didn’t read much yesterday. I might spend a bit more time reading today to refill the creative well. But I did get a lot of editing done yesterday and I’m almost done with book 2.
Outlining: time spent: 0
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 6 hours, 11 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: n/a
Writing: Overall writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 58 minutes
My takeaway for today: In order to try to get started on work sooner when my brain is less tired, try doing house chores after work and see if the thought of the unfinished chores bother me or not while I’m working.
My second takeaway for today: I figured out why my self-editing is so bad and why I dislike it so much! It also reinforces my decision to change to a slower, more deliberate writing style that edits as I write.
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