Editing isn't a one-stop shop.
Editing. It's the dirty word of writing. For most, it's the part where the fun and creativity goes to sleep or drives off into the sunset, leaving you with a boring, tedious, time-consuming, and oh-so-not-at-all-fun WORK of finding out just had poorly you can spell and how much you use weak verbs and too many adverbs and why you should just chuck your Creative Writing MFA and go sell... Sorry. Got a little lost in the weeds there.
But it doesn't have to be.
Maybe it will never be fun exactly, but it doesn't have to totally suck either.
And the best thing is that the more you learn to do it effectively, the better you tend to be at it.
But, at its heart, what is it exactly?
Not That Kind of Onion
No need to cry about it, editing has layers, just like an onion. (I never said my puns were actually funny. Sorry.) Still, just like our sweet Vidalia metaphor, editing gets more specific and more useful the deeper you dig into it.
When lots of folks think about editing, they are thinking of just one thing. That one thing might be proofreading. It might be copyediting. It might even be concept editing. Some folks might mentally jump straight to story editing. But each one of these isn't just a 'one thing.' They're all just a part of something bigger--the process of editing.For me, rather than breaking it into categories like those, I prefer to think about the pieces of the story we're editing, hence my onion metaphor.
Layer 1: Words
The atom of your story (yes, it's a new metaphor, just stay with me) is the individual word. It's the basic building block of your sentences, your paragraphs, your chapters, and your stories. It's the tree that makes the forest possible. And unlike that cliche, sometimes we writers can't see the trees for the forest. We're so busy noticing the sprawling majesty of the story that we can't or don't notice the individual words that created it.
