On Editing

The editing was tedious and endless. Someone, the author or friend or professional editor continually roams the landscape of the language finding typos and word repetition errors and missing letters and words from sloppy cutting and pasting and the likes. But it's wonderful it gets done. Prickly errors get plucked.

Then there's the larger problems of the right order in which to put information in the sequence of telling a story. Sometimes this means discovering that a sentence has been repeated. Sometimes that you write something that depends on the reader already knowing some information that the text has failed to supply.

Or, due to the bewildering process of going over the text many times, the story starts to change: develop a new point, even a new central theme that requires going back and adjusting many sentences and expressions for overall logical consistency.

Throughout the process the writer is blessed and condemned by finding out through the very process of finding the right words to write how the narrative or story continually fights back, trying to take control of the story that writer is almost always wrong in thinking he or she knows what to say. The story struggles to tell itself.  If one saves everyday's draft, the folder gets thick enough to slow down the computer.

The final story that emerges is the game day thing. When the writer lays out the game plan, but then must wait to see how the opposition (the reader) responds to the reading of the book, positively enough the writer hopes, so that other readers are willing to play the game.

My guess is that practice and repetition of play endlessly is the only tedious possible preamble to any hope of winning.  Learning scales as preamble to playing a song.