Editing: Why and How by Don Bates
Editing is something we writers would rather not do because of the time and energy involved. But there’s not much choice since few, if any, of our initial drafts are perfect as written.
In his “The Complete Polysyllabic Spree,” Nick Hornby says editing is essential because “the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress.”
In a March 4, 2017 Guardian essay on writing, George Saunders says a good editor is “like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?”
To edit well, he urges us to adhere to a process:
“Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.”
More specifically, “Revising [editing] is a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.”
Great advice from two gifted writers for improving all our writing.