A Desire to Make Things Better

Early last week a girl I happened to be following on Tumblr posted a query to her followers asking if anyone would be willing to edit an essay she had written. I, as you might know, have quite a bit of experience with writing and editing (or at least more than the average internet user), and I instantly thought that I could do so easily. Instead of informing her, however, I kept quiet; she seemed to be a relatively popular user, and of her many followers I was a random nobody.

She reblogged the query again an hour later, at which point I realized that, despite my expectations, nobody had responded. Since I really wasn't doing anything that afternoon, I nervously sent her a message, which she responded to a few minutes later, and before long I had her essay in my email box ready to be looked over.

This was the first time I edited anything for anybody since my last month of Journalism in high school, and though she was only looking for grammatical errors I still felt pretty excited to be entrusted with somebody else's work.

This experience reminded me that, contrary to the opinions of many would-be writers, I love to edit. It seems to me that everyone I know that loves to write hates to edit, so I have this minor fear that by admitting to being on the other team everyone's going to look down their nose at me, but it doesn't matter because I'm going to confess to it anyway.

Look at me pull random semi-related images from the internet LIKE A BOSS.

Don't get me wrong; I love not editing, too. That's one thing that NaNoWriMo taught me. Before my first NaNoWriMo year, all my writing had been shorts bursts of fiction, maybe a few paragraphs of a story before I started going back and fixing grammar mistakes, until I caught some good idea for the next few paragraphs, and so on. NaNoWriMo was the first time I sat down for an extended period of time and just wrote, and while at times is was scary or worrisome, there were plenty of moments that it felt exhilarating, like mentally flying.

Editing is completely different, and yet it feels exhilarating to me in it's own way. I could make up some nonsense about the mental release I get fixing mistakes, but in all honesty I'm not sure why the act of editing feels so positive to me.

I specifically remember writing a short story a couple years ago (titled 'Service'), almost two thousand words in length and completed in a night, and then spending the next several months pouring over that short manuscript, trimming paragraphs and fixing dialogue and clarifying descriptions. I knew exactly what I was looking for in the story, and every time I re-read it I knew that I wasn't quite there yet.

The last time I edited 'Service' was a several months ago, when I realized I needed to change something about the setting, and even now I know that if I looked back over it I'm sure I could find something else that needs changing. I think what some people dislike about the editing process is the fact that you never really know when you're done, because you could almost always change some little thing about whatever you've written.

That's something I love, however, and I guess the only way I can explain it is by stretching a metaphor about playing the piano. I picked up piano playing sometime early last year just for the fun of it (and because the piano we own really needs the use), and recently I've been teaching myself how to play a certain song by the Anglo-French singer/songwriter J.J. Burnel. The song is pretty complicated for a low-level pianist like myself, and though I've been playing it over and over, I haven't once played it 100% perfectly; every time I play it, however, I can feel myself getting just a bit better at it, just a bit more familiar with the notes, and it's exciting.

That's kind of what editing feels like. I'm not sure if I can ever get my writing to be 100% perfect, but when I re-read and make little changes I feel like I'm getting there, just a bit better.

I would have been a copy-editor for my high school newspaper if I hadn't tested out early. Those few months before I left, when there was still a chance that I'd have to suffer through senior year, I realized how much I enjoyed the idea of being a copy-editor, of sitting down to a stack of everyone else's rough drafts and handing them back the next day, 'murdered' in red ink (my mentor always made that analogy when he can to return a particularly poorly written piece).

Ideally I'd be editing my own work, but it was after that experience in high school that I realized I wouldn't mind being a copy-editor for a publishing company instead of some 'famous and successful' novelist. My dad always said that a good job is something you enjoy doing, so it doesn't feel like work, and I am extremely grateful to the girl who needed someone to look over her essay last week for giving me the chance to remember how much I honestly do enjoy all aspects of writing.