Anally retentive writing practices

[desecration]

I know many authors swear by letting old stories go and focusing on new.

I do not. If you can fix it and make it better, go ahead. Sometimes the idea only comes out after several revisions and multiple years of time between them.

 

[StillStunned]

Be very careful. Overediting is a thing. You tweak and tweak until every sentence is just right, and all of a sudden, everything reads flat and mechanical. All you've done is strip your voice out of it.

I find that the editing stage is when I pause and consider whether everything sounds natural. Whether my sentences and paragraphs transition smoothly from one to the next. Whether the sounds and the rhythm work.

This is the stage where I make sure that it doesn't sound mechanical. And the way I see it, as long as you have this clear goal in mind, there's no such thing as overediting.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I know many authors swear by letting old stories go and focusing on new. But do you have any comparable activities that you know are just indulging your inner pedant?

Unless it's a severe technical cock-up (like an italics html error that turned the whole second page into italics), I'll leave an error as it is. I'll occasionally add a comment pointing out the goof, but I take the view it's a waste of my time as well as waste of Laurel's time, and nobody really cares.

Although someone did comment on a spelling error in an eight year old story, but I'm never ever going to go fix that. He was the anal pedant, not me.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I was writing three stories at once, early last year and frankly wasn't getting very far with any of them so I picked one and just finished it in one night. By doing so I really screwed up the ending. Truly it was bad. It was rushed and it was obvious to the readers. About two months ago, I submitted an edited version, cleaning it up a lot. The story flows better and the ending is much better.

That's about it. I have another story that I don't like to read anymore because it's obvious to me now that it should have been written in 3rd person, rather than 1st. But fixing it would involve a complete rewrite. I may do it some day, though. A little at a time.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Unless it's a severe technical cock-up (like an italics html error that turned the whole second page into italics), I'll leave an error as it is. I'll occasionally add a comment pointing out the goof, but I take the view it's a waste of my time as well as waste of Laurel's time, and nobody really cares.

Although someone did comment on a spelling error in an eight year old story, but I'm never ever going to go fix that. He was the anal pedant, not me.

Yeah - I let silly stuff go. But, re-reading this story, with the perspective of having written many others, I found the dialog grating. As I really like the story, I decided to polish it a bit.

Emily