[Discussion] Urgh, editing

Hiya, everyone! So you just finished a short piece/chapter, and you're dying to post it for the world to see. You immediately post it, but shortly after you noticed a bunch of typos and grammar mistakes, oops.

This is where editing comes it! So today I want to discuss about your guys' editing/drafting process. Do you edit as you type and that's it? Or you do several edits/drafts before posting?

My editing process for fanfic I tend to go at least two rounds, one for quick grammar/typo proofreading and add any extra description I missed while writing and another reading aloud to polish the prose a bit. Sometimes I'll also do one last round of edits if I'm able to have a beta reader look through my work for a second opinion on things.

rp poster invading here, but tbf i think the process would be similar in this case too, at least considering how rp posts in this community are

I don't really ever feel like reading all I wrote for a second time, so I normally check while Im halfway through a post, or just do a quick read when I'm finally done, because I know that if I give my full attention to my writing, I'm going to end up changing everything.

It's not something that's just limited to RP or any other fiction writing style, it happens with stuff like uni reports as well. My editing process is giving a quick read to check all ideas line up, there's no typos and correct what I spot. I only really change stuff if I feel the paragraph is so bad during my quick revision, but at least with reports I usually don't have that problem.

What I do is post it on privatter, proofread it three/four/five times and edit while proofreading. There are some literary freedom things I won't edit, though like "such" not being followed with the word "a" because I don't want to overuse it. Final edit consists of me throwing it onto Google Drive to see what I missed and editing it as follows. There's so much I miss on my own, so having Google docs highlight the things I didn't notice helps a lot, from time to time.

Except when they tell me CHANGE THIS TO THE AMERICAN SPELLING THAT'S THE BRITISH ONE because I will not. :) It's axe not ax.

3 drafts.
First: Write it down
Second: Plot, character voice, flow, and scene logic edits
Third: Grammar, sentence flow, styles, word choice, spelling edits

I work on a single continuous document rather than doing multiple drafts. I can't stand the tedium of re-writing everything from scratch and honestly, for my fic here, I'm pretty lax about editing. For my books, I generally write the whole thing and then go over it myself. Then I go over it chapter by chapter with my editor a few times before doing a final continuous sweep again.

yeah my editing process is continuous and kinda vague... usually im pretty good at hitting what i want as im going, but every time i stop for the day and come back to it later i re-read everything i have so far. and edit a little where it needs. and then get back to adding more content in. and then do it again until its done! but when it's fully finished i like to close it out and leave it alone for a few hours or a day or so, then come back for a final read-thru and fixes! easy enough :)

This is an interesting excerpt I saved from an article somewhere a long time ago...

Gushers and Tricklers
In regard to the work habits of professional authors, Robertson Davies insisted that there are just two kinds of writers, "gushers" and "tricklers." Take a moment to consider which category you fall into.
[James] Thurber was a gusher; for one story which was 20,000 words when finished, he wrote a total of 240,000, and fifteen different versions. It is interesting that the torrential Thurber is the one who talked most about that dread of all writers - drying up. . . . Frank O'Connor was also a gusher; he rewrote some of his stories even after they had been published.

The tricklers may be represented by William Styron, who says: ''I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph--each sentence, even--as I go along.'' Dorothy Parker, also a trickler, said: ''I can't write five words but I change seven!''

The industry of the gushers commands respect; Joyce Cary, Frank O'Connor, and [Truman] Capote--we see them writing and revising, rejecting pages by the handful, and finally piecing their work together from the mass. But the tricklers have an agony of their own; they cannot continue until the last line written is as right as they can make it. Both methods seem to take about an equal amount of time.
(Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading, rev. ed. Penguin, 1990)

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I am most definitely a trickler. Those quotes from William Styron and Dorothy Parker resonate painfully with me! I can fixate on a single sentence for hours and hours trying to get it right, and I'm utterly incapable of moving past it until I do, especially that dreaded opening sentence/paragraph. I obsessively edit and fiddle and tweak as I write. It's not something I recommend as it tends to lose the magic that comes from just letting the words pour out of you, which my sister, in comparison, is very good at, and her writing flows more naturally than mine. But for some reason, I just... can't do it! Everyone tells me "just write, don't fret so much" but it's like telling someone with OCD to just "stop obsessing". Ah, the woes of perfectionism while simultaneously not believing in perfection...