How to Survive Camp NaNoWriMo and Daily Writing

July Fourteenth

By: K.M. Wieland (taken off of her blog with permission)

Should you edit as you go?

Authors are passionately divided on the subject of editing in medias res. Should we write our first drafts as fast as possible, dumping our creativity on the page while it’s still smoking hot, never stopping to tweak so much as a misspelled word until we’ve got it all safely down on paper? Or should we write a little more thoughtfully, taking the time to craft our words and our ideas as we go, stopping to fix problems whenever we realize something isn’t working? These are tough questions, and the answers, unfortunately, aren’t much easier. In his review (The Writer, August 2010) of The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook edited by Daniel Alarcón Holt, Chuck Leddy presents a neat summarization of the opposing views on the subject:

On the … difficult question of whether you should polish (i.e., revise) your sentences as you go along or wait until after the first draft is finished, we seem to get a different answer from each author. Irish novelist Anne Enright says, “I work the sentences and the rhythms all the time. I can’t move on from a bad sentence; it gets more and more painful, like leaving a child behind you on the road.” Curtis Sittenfield (Prep), however, completely disagrees: “I strongly feel that trying, in a first draft, to make every sentence shine and be perfect before moving on to the next one is a recipe for never finishing a novel.”

Like so much of the writing life, the answer to this little conundrum is largely bound up in each writer’s personality and preferred working methods. Perfectionism can be an easy trap to fall into, and far too many writers have choked themselves up—sometimes permanently—by obsessing about the mistakes in already-written chapters, instead of pushing ahead to write new material. On the other hand, writers like Enright (and myself) get more than a little crazy if we know there’s a problem with that previous scene and we can’t go back to fix it. It’s like a splinter under a fingernail—painfully niggling until we finally pay attention to it.

So how do you decide which tactic is best for you? Following are some pros and cons:

Editing As You Go

Pro: Much cleaner first drafts.

Con: Time-intensive first drafts.

Pro: A confident sense of cohesion as each piece settles into place.

Con: Sand traps of perfectionism and doubt that never allow you to move on.

Editing After the First Draft

Pro: Fast and furious first drafts.

Con: Messy first drafts.

Pro: An unfettered rush of subconscious-level creativity.

Con: Uncertainty and insecurity over the worth of the storm of words on the pages behind you.

In order to decide whether you should edit as you go or not, you need to evaluate your writing methods and decide whether or not perfectionism is likely to slow you down to the point where that first draft will never get written. If you can resist the siren song of obsessive perfectionism, editing as you go can allow you to spend the time to craft a cohesive and solid first draft. However, if you feel early editing is likely to discourage your progress, ruthlessly put it off until the end of the first draft. The happy conclusion is that whether you edit in the middle of a project or at its end is ultimately irrelevant to the quality of a story.