Cutting or Pasting

Do you edit up or down?

 

When you are an author and self-publisher I often find the biggest issue comes during editing, mainly because I'm never sure where the barriers are between drafting, rewriting and editing. When writing for someone else to edit we ensure that we are happy with the story, the detail and length before we send it off. When editing yourself, I find that I am doing the rewriting along with my edits probably creating twice as much work for myself, but I find it hard to let things go.

My other issue is I tend to hurry the story along, then when I finish my story is often too short, leading me to go back and add huge chunks of detail that is necessary to allow the book to make sense to someone who is not in my head, meaning that I am editing the content around my new additions, which causes me to have to re-edit the new stuff as well as the old. When I originally finished my new book Retaliation, it had just under 40,000 words, now after many bouts of rewrites, redrafting and editing I am now at 60,000 words, leading me to believe that I am the worst editor ever.

'we are never happy with the story, there is always something to change or adapt or play with, it's never quite perfect,'

Seriously though this issue plays into the problem with editing your own books, because as authors we are never done, we are never happy with the story, there is always something to change or adapt or play with, it's never quite perfect, the time comes that enough is enough and you have to accept that it's the best it's going to be, otherwise you would never release a book.

I have started to change the way I do this now, trying to build up the barriers, previously all drafting, rewriting and editing took place in front of my computer, to be read over and over and deleted, re-wrote and changed without it ever seeing paper. With  my most recent book I rewrote and drafted about three times before I thought it was done, then I printed out some copies and showed them to my beta readers. Once I received their notes I took back to my computer and made the suggested changes that I found to be relevant. Then I printed the book out again, this time forcing myself to read it without changing any details at the time but instead highlighting anything that I felt needed changed, this became my editing stage. Once I had made these notes I was able to come back and make the changes again at the computer feeling comfortable that it was now ready. As a last precaution I would now show the completed book back to the initial readers to gain some final feedback before release.

I am beginning to find that this is best way to build up the barriers again, allowing me to be an author first and editor second.

What do you think? What do you do that's different? Let me know below.