The glorious unburdening of less

October 8, 2014

Editing can be a painful process. You must kill your darlings, taking funny point of dialogue, cool action moves, and even entire scenes and cutting them. It hurts to leave behind something that could have been great, were it not holding your story back.

But that’s for the larger edits. For the smaller edits, the copy edits—those are actually sort of fun. Really! Taking a sentence and cutting it down to its essence, carving out an extra “then” or an errant “the”, paring down the descriptive text and streamlining the dialogue until it sparkles is actually sort of fun.

It’s strange. Editing isn’t supposed to be the fun part, and compared to writing, it’s not. But taking this thing you’ve created and uncovering its hidden potential amid the extra words is wonderful. It’s like a burden is lifted off the text, and you as well.

It’s not that editing is fun. It’s tedious and draining. But the result is something else. It may be hard, but the result is worth it. Cut away the dross, and the story below can shine. That’s when you find out how good your story really is.