Tuesday, November 9, 2010

I don't like to Edit

Among those who like to write I think you will find the majority of writers hate to edit. I'm one of those.
Also, since I write in my free time and since I'm not being paid for this, ALL my time is precious to me. If I was paid for it I would hire someone to edit for me as long as I was overseeing it very carefully. So, mostly you will find what I  write often in a rough draft form straight out of my fingers into the keyboard. I write directly and tend to publish on the wing and I tend to "fly by the seat of my pants" in regard to writing in general.

However, if I really want things to turn out more perfectly I will go up to the "Edit" function that I have here in Firefox two words over from the Program name Firefox at the very top left of my page and I click on Edit. If you click on edit you will see two of the words in the foldout called "Copy" and "Paste". These words are incredibly helpful to any writer of anything. Because once you copy almost any length of whatever you write you can literally "paste" it anywhere including into "Word" to spellcheck or syntax check what you have been writing. This greatly eliminates time and errors in general. Another thing you can do is to then repaste it back here to Blogger.com into your Blog site or wherever you want to paste a more "edited" version of what you are writing. Also, it can be helpful to keep multiple copies with slightly different name variations like "Variation 2" or "Variation 3" like that in case you screw up or the computer loses information that you don't want to.

But generally, if I don't want to spend forever editing something (it is usually at the very least 5 to 10 times more than writing it in the first place) to edit anything to where you think it is good enough and perfect enough, I usually just leave it in an imperfect conversational form. Sometimes, this brings and realness and immediateness between the reader and you as fully edited works sometimes make the finished work seem distant and impersonal like a news article. So, as you write remember what you are trying to accomplish with what you are writing. Also, life is an experiment and so is whatever you write. Like all communcation it is an artform more than it is a science although it can be both.

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