Editing – after or while you write?

Quick answer: after.

Editing, rewriting, polishing – whatever you call it, every writer hates it. It’s already so laborious to push that draft out, and that draft always feels so perfect, so creatively virgin, a product of purity. Why tamper with such sincerity?

Yet rewriting is where most of the writing is done. I quote Stephen King’s editor when he was a teenager. “Writing is telling yourself a story. Rewriting is telling someone else a story and taking everything out that is not the story.”

The question now is, when. And from my quick answer, you should know that it’s after – after your draft is done and a whole manuscript has been birthed. Not halfway while you’re writing, not in the middle of delivering that manuscript.

Think of editing as cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn infant. You wouldn’t cut the umbilical cord during childbirth, so you shouldn’t edit while you’re writing. Cut the cord after the baby is born, and edit after you’ve finished writing.

It’s very tempting to snip, trim, shorten while you’re writing. And when you don’t have momentum, that’s a tempting thing to do – after all, you’re not inspired, are you? But writing, professional writing, is not about inspiration. It’s about writing even when you don’t feel like it.

Editing while you are writing is not productive (unless it’s simple spelling and grammatical errors) because until you have a finished product, you don’t have the big picture. You can edit better once the draft is done because you know how you’re starting, how you’re ending, and how you intend to get there. Without that sense of where and when the story is going to flow, editing won’t be as effective as if you did it at the end.

But then maybe you have an outline, a set of beats, a plan. Surely that is the roadmap of your story structure, and surely you can edit with that in mind?

I disagree. It’s just a roadmap – not the actual path you’re travelling. You need the actual experience of going through the story in order to understand the feel and flow of the whole piece. Then your editing will be more effective, and come from a holistic perspective.

So get to it! Write instead of reading about writing!