No Duct Tape Required
Editing is one of the most important things about writing, and one of the most hated, and yet… I love editing. I really do. Many have called me crazy for it, but the editing phases are when my story comes together. Yes, phases, plural. It’s never been a case of editing once and be done with it for me.
Before I explain why I love editing so much, there are a few things I need to explain about me as a writer, first.
The first one is that I’m pantser, through and through. I’ve tried scene cards, tried plotting, but I can’t seem to get more than three scenes jotted down before I run into a wall of blankness. The second is that I see writing a story as a road trip. I know where I’m starting from, and I have a good idea where I’m going, but the rest is uncharted territory, so to speak. I’ll follow my characters through their world, will take many wrong turns, find a number of dead ends, but somehow my characters will end up where I wanted them to end. The journey itself is entirely theirs, faults and all.
Now that we have that cleared away, let me show you what my love for editing means.
I start my editing phase (the first of a few) with a finished first draft, complete with unfinished, aborted, and deleted scenes. First, I do a read through, because I won’t have read my story in at least a week or two–stories are like wine, you let them rest to acclimatise–and I might have been writing something else. I need to get back into the world, familiarize myself with my characters again. At that point, I’ll read all the scenes, including the deleted ones, because no matter how silly the scene, a gem might be buried in it, and it would be a waste to miss out on it. Sometimes, one little line or clue is all that may survive, but that still makes writing the whole scene worth it. Without it, that line or clue wouldn’t have existed.
I make notes while I read, noting what the scenes are about, what I feel needs adding, what I think I should strike. Not to mention notes about the characters and the world that I’d forgotten, somehow. (It happens; my mind is like a sieve sometimes.) While reading, I often find little plot-holes, wrong assumptions, unsolved threads, or name mix-ups. I write them all down. During this read-through, I slowly sink deeper and deeper into the world. While writing, I was still discovering the world, so now, I start living and breathing the world, and am much more aware of every aspect of it. By the time I get to the actual edit, my mind will be with the characters and the world most of the day. I get up with them and go to sleep with them.
It doesn’t stop there, though, my love for editing. No. The feeling sticks with me all through my edit, from beginning to end. It doesn’t matter whether I’m correcting simple spelling mistakes, word order, or whether I’m filling in the plot-holes, deleting parts because they look like I was high when writing them, or reshuffling my scenes until the order of events starts to make sense (it happens, even if I write mostly linear).
My men (aka: my husband and sons) have seen me grinning like mad because a little rewrite makes much more sense of a paragraph I could barely make heads or tails of. Or they’ve seen me clap my hands when I’ve solved a problem because I found a throw away line in a deleted scene that explains it all.
As a side note: the clapping–a very unconscious thing at first–seems to have turned into something of a ritual, like a pat on the back. I tend to do it after every little niggle I smooth over. If I start paying attention to it, it really looks quite ridiculous, but it makes me feel very accomplished anyway. So why stop it, right?
When I’m done solving all the issues and have glued all the bits and pieces together, it’s time for checking the boring stuff. And I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find some kind of satisfaction in this part, too. Every garbage- and filler word, every tell instead of show, every passive voice that I manage to catch and rewrite makes me smile a bit more.
Though, yes, I have to admit, when I still catch mistakes during a final read-through, I do sigh at myself. Plus, once my betas and critters get their hands on the story, I’m sure they’ll still find plenty wrong with it. And then, I’ll just start the whole process again.
Of course, in the end, it’s not about catching the oopses or ohohs at all. It’s about growing my story from a little idea into a full-fledged novel, novella, or short story. It’s about seeing that story grow stronger, tighter, better with each change I make. It’s feeling accomplished about what I’ve already achieved while knowing I still have so much to learn. It’s about loving what I do, from beginning to end, from writing to editing.
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Blaine D. Arden is a purple haired, forty-something, writer of gay romance with a love of men, music, mystery, magic, fairies, platform shoes, and the colours black, purple and red, who sings her way through life. Born and raised in Zutphen, the Netherlands, Blaine spent many hours of her sheltered youth reading, day dreaming, making up stories and acting them out with her barbies.
Blaine is the author of The Forester, The Fifth Son, and Aliens, Smith and Jones. Her most recent short story, “His Best Defense”, is included in Storm Moon Press’ Legal Briefs anthology. She can be found at her website or on Twitter @BlaineDArden.
In my experiences, especially with our 
The logical move for companies is to simply let the market regulate itself. If there is truly no market for the fiction that is provided by publishers (or even self-published authors who put their work out all on their lonesome), then no one will buy the book, no hype will be generated, and those authors won’t make money off their work, which for some, will be enough of a deterrent to writing more fiction like it in the future. If, on the other hand, there is a market for the kink or taboo that some find ‘objectionable’, then the fiction will find that market, and those who don’t like it will usually ignore it. The market drives itself. Those who don’t like the material in a book (assuming it is clearly labeled as having said material) will usually not bother buying, and that’s just as well. Most writers don’t want people to buy their book when those people know right off the bat that they won’t enjoy it. Let the books find their audiences or let them fade into obscurity.
There is a certain double standard in many policies, not so much in the way they are written for distributors, but in the way they are enforced. For the most part, they aren’t enforced at all, but the moment you mix erotic content, especially if it’s GLBT erotic content, with any of the topics that might be skirting the comfort zones of some readers, you wind up with a suppression notice and have to find another place to take your fiction, no matter how legitimate it is or how big an audience is looking forward to purchasing it. It’s not that the policy is problematic, but the lack of consistency in its enforcement certainly is, and that kind of inconsistency just makes the company look silly. Now, I’m not saying that people will stop going to Amazon or Barnes & Noble just because they’re inconsistent with their policies and censor books almost arbitrarily, but it still doesn’t make them look good. When the market could theoretically regulate itself, their inconsistent regulation through unclear policies isn’t doing them any favors. In fact, it’s making them miss out on potential sales for legitimate titles containing legitimate kinks enjoyed by legitimate people.
