Note about editing

Editing is different for everyone in the way that they approach it. Some already know what needs to change, and they start there and then dig around from there. But then there are some that already think that their work is perfect and that nothing needs to change. Until it's already too late and everyone's pointing out typos and what not.

I suggest a few things as we start this writing process:

1) Love yourself. I find that if my self-confidence is low for whatever reason, then approaching editing makes me feel even worse. I start battering myself with thoughts like, "Why couldn't I have thought of this in the first place?" or "How could I write this?! I'm better than that!" Thinking like this can--and has always been--destructive not only for the revision process, but for the sanity and self-confidence of yourself. If you love your words right now, just don't make the revising personal.

2) Accept that what you wrote is flawed. The words have made mistakes, but you're not there to fix them, you're there to make them the best that they can be. It's not about what you thought would be your favorite line. You have to be unbiased and uncaring. I know that most of us thought of our books as our babies (SO guilty of this...) but when you start editing, let it go.

I think at the beginning of NaNo, we had to trap out inner-editors in a cage and lock it up tight so that it wouldn't leak out so that we could get our novels done. However, some of us may seem to forget that we have to release them when we start editing. And when we release them, we have to put something back in the cage/box/cave thing. I suggest we put the emotional feelings we may have gained over the month. They won't help us while we're working. As Mycroft said in Sherlock (best TV series...EVER):

"Caring is not an advantage."

Of course make it the best it can be! Just don't make it personal.

3) Go as detailed or as vague as you want. If you just want to switch scenes, or chop every word, just realize that it's all fine. Just like you can write whatever you want, you can edit whatever you want. It's all fine. Just make sure that you catch those typos and punctuation errors, along with reading it aloud to find the grammatical errors.

I might add more as I go along. But that's what I keep in mind.

One Word

In AP Literature, we've been looking at what the differences between a word, a sentence, and a paragraph are. There's a book, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, that introduces a technique of reading that we've never looked into before. It's close reading. The difference between that and (usually) regular reading is reading verses soaking each word in.

With each word, there is the implicit and explicit definition. The explicit looks like this:

quench

\ kwench \  , verb;

1.

To slake, satisfy, or allay (thirst, desires, passion, etc.).

However, the implicit is something like what it connotates, or what it leans towards when I say it. Usually the connotation is either positive or negative, but words like sinister or toxic have a more dark connotation compared to just negative. There is even neutral or cold, like stigma or beaker. I mention these because I had to include those in my book.

I was almost going into a really in-depth concept, but skipping along, the moral of this story is that one word can change the entire meaning for the novel. We can look at a sentence and get the general meaning just by skimming and assuming because of subject and verb that this is what they're thinking. But what they use to describe those two things (or even the verbs themselves) can be the polar opposite of what you had been thinking. Like this from the Abandoned Farmhouse by Ted Kooser: 

a tall man too, says the length of the bed 

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, 

says the Bible with a broken back

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

Now, the rest of the poem deals with the sudden disappearance of a small family from a farmhouse, and the reader is left to put all of the pieces together to why they left. But this part particularly intrigued me. 

Initially, you would see a couple of cliches (good, God-fearing man) and automatically because of our experience in life, we've gathered that God-fearing doesn't actually mean fearing, but it is a way of saying that one is really religious. However, when we see broken, we may also think that it is just used overly. But what good, God-fearing man would describe the bible's binding as broken? That connotates pain, fervent searching, maybe even throwing it across the room. Then we realize that God-fearing may actually mean God-fearing. Then we see that this man may not be good, it may be sarcasm. He could be the nastiest man alive. 

All from the word broken. 

The power of words is one of the strongest forces in the world, pertaining to the mind. You put one next to the other, and they both create different colors together. Then string thousands of them together, let them dangle, let them hog chunks of space, let the introverts remain by themselves. Each word was placed there for a reason. Soak it in.