writing and editing

[marguerite_26]

faithwood's recent post on the self-editing process is totally made of win. As I am currently attempting to self-edit, and thus procrastinating badly, I will take the time to point you to it.

I love talking about self-editing and post-beta editing and such things, but really, we rarely talk about them without referencing a specific work, which makes it all kinda concritty and political.

For this discussion, Faith created a weird trudgy sort of action sequence just for the purpose of the meta post. Then went about 'fixing it' and yet... there is no end to fixing it really, because everyone would 'fix it' in different ways.

So in the end, she had a paragraph that is pretty much fine (completely out of context of any fic) but lacked any sweat orgasms real personal style, but still a perfectly fine paragraph. So she challenged her flist to take that 'fixed' paragraph and fiddle with it to make it 'better' - whatever 'better' means to you. Fun little writing exercise! and it fed into my procrastination nicely, I might add.

Check it out, and have some fun. Neat to see a paragraph take on a different life in each unique set of hands. :D

Comments

[bewarethesmirk.livejournal.com]

thanks for linking to this! i tried it out. :D

[marguerite-26.livejournal.com]

I saw! YAY! Lovely paragraph!

quite an interesting exercise.

[rickey-a.livejournal.com]

I think something that can happen in editing is loss of the gestalt. We evaluate flow, sentence length, word choices, etc. and the danger is getting lost in the minutia so that you lose the overall intention of the scene. Where is the tension? What are the key elements of the scene.

Now my own style is particularly stripped down and fast paced, and not everyone likes that. My own stab at it was to focus on the key elements and stip it down to 200 words. LOL.

fun exercise
it's interesting to see what people do

[marguerite-26.livejournal.com]

Where is the tension? yes, well - in this case I think the tension is not lost in the editing. The tension (and humour and charaterisation etc) was not put in there because it was written as a exercise in editing, not an exercise in creating tension.

But I do think it was interesting how each person took the paragraph and added what they felt was missing, which really was adding a bit of their personal style, their preferred writing style into the paragraph. And yet, I would not read any of them and say one was necessarily 'better' than any other. Just that my reading preference led me to like some more than others.

[rickey-a.livejournal.com]

yes, exactly. There was nothing left to edit on the example she gave. Had I been the beta, I probably would've only said to split the paragraph in two (chase & catch).

So in order to play with the tightness of the scene, most folks did what I did which was to rewrite with focus and we ended up with various styles and influences. I think when you reach the point where your over-editing, you need to just go in and rewrite.

I think a good exercise to play with word economy and sentence structure variation woud be to use a setting description instead of an action sequence. Like look at a photo of a setting and write a single paragraph describing someone walking into that setting.

[katelinmr.livejournal.com]

I already saw it :D

She's really brilliant isn't she? n_n

♥

[marguerite-26.livejournal.com]

*loves her*

♥