The Importance of Editing Music
True news: editing your own stuff is a long, arduous processes. If you have intention of being a “real writer,” you’d best accustom yourself to participating because, hint: that travesty you dashed off during NaNo is ready for neither publication nor a paid, or bartered, editor to read because Jesus in a hand basket why would you subject anyone to that piece of shit. This holds true for every writer in the universe and I don’t care who he, she, neutral, other, is.
Oh, but it is painful, often takes longer than the writing itself, and is animate, and malevolent, enough to turn you into a brainless word zombie.
Part of the difficulty is the inherent contradiction in a decent editing effort: you read the damn thing so many times you are stone bored. I’m going to kill this thing burn it with fire because I can’t possibly. Look. At. It. One. More. Time. Bored. You may love your story/novella/novelette/novel (well, you’re a writer, so probably not but you may a least be able to admit to there being something worth salvaging in it). You may periodically think, hey, if I didn’t know I wrote this, I’d think it was a decent thingy. But you will know it backwards and forwards, up and down, right and left and you will be thoroughly sick of it.
And yet. Yet. You always find something requiring rewriting or correction or eradication (because, by this point, it’s not deletion, it’s eradication) which means the damn book that you’ve poured blood, sweat, tears, hours of sleep, time you’d like to spend watching back episodes of The Musketeers, and dinners comprised of toast and popcorn will never be fucking perfect and oh my god how can I possibly spend this long working on something and it not be perfect and my OCD really hurts right now and I want to sleep for a year and why did I ever fucking think I could write a fucking book that anyone might actually want to read and I’m an idiot… or some variant thereof.
Personalize at will.
Music helps. Well, music helps me. I listen to a pretty wide range when I’m writing depending on my mood, how much noise I’ve had to deal with during the day, what sort of scene I’m working on, and which characters are involved.
Editing starts that way. As it becomes a slog, though, I find my tastes changing to something I can shake my butt and air drum too. Sometimes (shhh, don’t tell), I even sing. Which can be interesting for hubs when I’m wearing the noise-canceling apparatus.
I highly recommend this effective and humiliating method of getting through the process.
My current selections:
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