February 13, 2024

Everyone needs an editor. Everyone. (Including editors.) Editing is multi-step process, best returned to after a walk, a glass of vino, rereading the larger context, and/or a good night’s sleep.

Editing others’ writing is a humbling undertaking. It exposes one’s impatience and tests one’s memory for obscure citation rules, “comma” sense, and noun/adjective/prefix/Latin prefix/number+(name the part of speech) hyphenation. It makes the spine of your Chicago Manual of Style get all loose and coats the cover with the atomized dust of the assorted nuts you eat to maintain your strength for word wrestling.

Editing fiction (one’s own) will drive you crazy because you just can’t rearrange a couple of words to sound like Flannery or Kingsolver or Achebe or Kipling or Lahiri or Rumer Godden or Saunders or Toni Cade Bambara or Karen Russell or any other of the authors you read and sigh over and say, “Dang, I wish I had written that sentence.”

Editing one’s own writing lives at the border of too little investment and too much delusion. Too little bravery and too much puttering. Too little self-annihilation and too much self-aggrandizement.

A good edit stands between the reader taking the time to read (or even skim), and, after taking the first look, throwing down the ever-so-excellently-written missive in disgust, uttering, “What self-indulgent drival. My time is worth more than it would take to wade through all those words!”

Editing is made easier–and harder–by suggestions offered by computers and other AI-relatives.

There will always, always, always be some typo somewhere. Life is short. Get over it.

I have.

You?

(Did you find the deleted word? The misspelled word?)

Thoughts on writing, faith, and life