Edit and Destroy!

I recently discovered an editing flaw that I didn’t realise I have.

When I’m editing something, I tend to read it out loud repeatedly, trying to catch the lumps and bumps that I don’t see when I’m reading through in my head. Sometimes I’ll have to stop for a while because the lump is actually more of mountain and needs some serious flattening out.

And then I’ll have to go back to the beginning again because I’ve lost my flow.

The result? A seriously over-edited first couple of paragraphs.

Somewhere in the middle of the process, the extra time I spend on the beginning of a piece of writing pays off: the chinks are ironed out and all the words are working nicely together... and then I take it too far.

I stretch the metaphors and polish the imagery so much that it becomes blinding and you can’t see what I was referring to in the first place. It’s a bit like when you’re cooking and you enjoy adding the spices so much that you keep on adding them – just a bit more of this and a tiny extra sprinkle of that - and then what you end up with is inedible.

I can’t see the extent of the damage while I’m doing all this because every time I read it I’m still thinking of the meaning I know was there when I started. It takes a bit of distance – at least a few days, if not longer – before I realise what I’ve done.

An example: the first line of Biscuit, which was the piece I wrote for The Character Project a couple of weeks ago: “A fruit fly scuttled round the ochre-green flowers, rubbing its feet through ceramic pollen.”

Any idea what that’s about?

No, neither did I when I read it back the other day.

I’ve removed all reference to the bathroom tiles I was talking about. I’ve totally undermined the impact of the ochre with the mind-boggling image of ceramic pollen. And I’ve succeeded in making the fruit fly sound seriously disoriented, which is perhaps something of a feat in itself.

This is clearly something I’m going to have to watch out for.

Image by Corey Anderson