2/16/2017: Some Novel Editing Guidelines

1. Warm up vignette first. It will remind you to love your writing and will take some of the droll that can come with the wrong approach to writing.
2. Don’t edit something just because it needs to be edited. It all needs to be edited. Read and do the work that calls you. Think of it like a conversation. You don’t have to drive through every topic that comes up. Drive through the ones that draw you. And stick with the conversation long enough, and you’ll have driven through each and every section of your book.
3. Don’t postpone something you want to do because it will take time. Do it now, while you want to.
4. Try not to get too bogged down in grammar and polish. At the same time, don’t necessarily ignore them. They just have a tendency to bog things down. To make you too linear and not nearly as right-brained and emotionally involved as you should be.
5. With that said, don’t get too linear. Feel free to jump around. Stop wherever you feel led to. Start over whenever you want.
6. Read what you’re editing a lot. Read perhaps more than you write. Read over and over. Read sporadically. Read in order.
7. And think. Read and think. And when I say think, I’m really talking about active quiescence. Daydream. Let your mind wander as you read and think about what you’ve written. Wait and let thoughts come to you. Read slowly.
8. Remove distractions, so those thoughts can come to you.
9. Unfinished things don’t have to be finished right now. Leave them unfinished until you’re led to do something with them, even if that’s to delete them. Also, whatever is next (after editing something) doesn’t have to finished right now. Work on whatever you’re led to. I relate it to writing a poem. You find bits that don’t really fit, but because you don’t know what will fit, you don’t necessarily have to replace those bits right away. You might reshape them some, but it’s in the reshaping of the whole poem that you find out if they fit or not and how you can change them to fit. So don’t feel like you have to know or polish what each part is when you come to it.
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