The short answer to this question is: I have no Earthly idea. Another short answer is: I wish I knew.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written about eight Zero Drafts in the last ten years. Most are still unfinished, a few will never see the light of day, and a few are actually complete stories from start to finish and have some potential.<\/p>\n
But even the completed stories need work. Lots and lots of work. And the problem with that is, I am lazy. I don\u2019t like work. Writing is one thing. Yes, writing is work, but it is also very freeing and therapeutic. And when you are writing a Zero Draft, nothing has to make sense. The writing part is fun.<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s actually time to turn a Zero Draft into something readable, a writer has to go back into the story and address all the things that don\u2019t make sense, that don\u2019t fit, that don\u2019t matter. What that ultimately means is a lot of re-writing (which I do not enjoy because I dislike writing a scene a second time, especially if I have to make it fit with the rest of the manuscript) and eliminating a lot of what was written the first time. It\u2019s like hacking apart a child, really: destroying something that came out of me, that I gave life to, that I created.<\/p>\n
Both of these aspects have kept me from doing in-depth edits of any of my more substantial works. It\u2019s easy to cut 10-20% of a 1000 word short story, or even increase it by that amount. But to make those kinds of edits to a 100,000+ word story, it\u2019s more of a chore.<\/p>\n
Or undertaking, rather. I look at it as a chore, but I know some people do enjoy editing. Some say that\u2019s where the real magic \u2013 and, indeed, the real satisfaction \u2013 comes from. I have yet to experience that. I am completely daunted by the prospect.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t even know where to start, to be completely honest, so I don\u2019t. I make a yearly resolution that this, finally, is the Year of Editing. And each year it turns into the Year of Excuses and the Year of Putting It Off One More Year.<\/p>\n
So there\u2019s the long answer to the question. I really hope that someday I develop a novel-editing process \u2013 someday soon \u2013 and that I can clean up one of my full-length novels. Until then, I will defer to the wisdom of my fellow Confabulators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The short answer to this question is: I have no Earthly idea. Another short answer is: I wish I knew. I\u2019ve written about eight Zero Drafts in the last ten years. Most are still unfinished, a few will never see the light of day, and a few are actually complete stories from start to finish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[327,1297],"class_list":["post-7868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-editing","tag-zero-draft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}