I have been working on the revisions to Marcelo in the Real World with Cheryl Klein, my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. Now that I have finished a first round of revisions (there will be a few more, I am sure) and have sent the manuscript to Cheryl for comments, I want to tell you a little about the process of editing. My hope is that the young people visiting this website who want to write, will get a better understanding of the writing process. Today’s lesson is on editing. Editing is a process that can begin at various stages. (Uggh! I sounded like a teacher just then!) It can begin once you have finished a first draft of the work, be it essay or poem or short story or novel. It can also begin when the work has been accepted for publication. The word “editing” is somewhat misleading. It makes one think of making sure that you have spelled all the words correctly and you have fixed all the typos. And it is that. But editing also involves re-writing. It involves tossing out a sentence or a paragraph or a passage or a chapter or two hundred pages and starting over. The big difference between this type of re-writing and just writing is that when you re-write you are doing it pursuant to a plan, a direction, a vision of who your characters are and what they are going to do. The act of writing for the first time, that is, the process of creating that you do as you work through your very first draft is done in a kind of intellectual darkness – you move along not knowing exactly where you are going. Creating requires intuition, editing requires reason. Creating is a movement forward that relies on trusting your gut. Editing requires reaching the end and then traveling backwards to make sure that all the pieces fit together and get you to the desired end. But even within the process of editing there is another type of movement – a kind of narrowing of focus that goes from the large to the small. Editing begins with tossing away what is no longer necessary, filling in new gaps by writing new scenes, and proceeds a narrowing path towards the characters, what they say and what they do, so that they remain true to who they are. Editing ends up with the author focusing laser-like on each sentence and each word so that every part, no matter how small, is part of the whole.
Maybe not all writers put their left side and right side of the brain to work when they write. I am sure that there are writers who manage to stay within the left (logical) hemisphere and there are probably miraculous works out there that are written solely from the right (intuitive hemisphere). (Gabriel García Marquez claims that One Hundred Years of Solitude was written over a frenzied, ecstatic period of two weeks when he didn’t sleep and barely ate.) But I think that if you want to write you should start out by trying to embrace all sides of yourself and by putting to work all that you have. I have found out that editing is hard for a beginning writer but that it gets easier if the beginning writer keeps on writing until he/she becomes an experienced writer. For any writer, the finished first draft usually seems so utterly brilliant that it is difficult to accept that it still needs work. Criticism at this stage, whether from a family member, friend or editor, will seem to totally miss the point and will even seem ignorant or mean-spirited. Suggestions for change will be seen as a violation of our deepest moral principles. Making the work more coherent, more readable, will be ‘selling out’. But for the older writer (and for the young/wise writer), criticism is always welcome, even if not accepted. For the older writer, the detail work of editing is also a pleasure, a pleasure different from the thrilling rush of creation, but still a pleasure. And if you persist in writing, there may come to you, as it did to me, the rare joy of collaboration – where you find one or two persons who are so in tune with your work, that their views seem as if they were coming from a part of your soul that you had not listened to before. Finding these persons, in whatever form they come to you, is a gift to your work and a blessing to you.
