Self Editing and Writing Stages

[Devor]

Greetings Scribes

It's been my opinion for a while that there are "stages" to learning how to write, and that writing advice can sometimes be a bit off because it's geared for a different stage than the writer is in.

But.... what are those stages? I'm not entirely sure.

I recently saw a Ted Talk about learning to be "good" at any skill in about 20 hours. According to the talk you need to learn "just enough to self-edit" and then focus on practicing. The idea is that you should be able to work against your mistakes, and not just run with them.

And, don't get confused, because it doesn't mean editing the way we normally think of editing. This isn't about fixing the little typos or ironing out the little issues you skipped earlier. Self-editing in this case refers to, "I'm doing something wrong, let me change what I'm doing so I can grow in this skill."

So.... what does "just enough to self-edit" mean for a writer?

 

[Heliotrope]

I think the Dunning Krueger effect is relevant to this. The Dunning Krueger effect is the theory that the less experience you have, the more confident you are. As you gain experience you start to be more cognitive of what you "don't know", and confidence decreases.

I do think this is relevant in writing in a few ways.

I often see a sort of cockiness to new writers. They have a sort of over-confidence to them. An ego. They seem to think their ideas are absolutely priceless and are worried about them 'getting stolen'. They are sure they are creative geniuses who just haven't been discovered yet. I think, when all you do is write for yourself in a little bubble and don't let anyone (subjective) read it than you can stay in this stage for a while. I am guilty of starting in this stage, and can recognize it when I see it.

Eventually, once you start letting people read your stuff your confidence starts to decrease. You see you are not getting the reactions you wanted. People don't "get" your stuff. Quality is lacking. Proper story structure or plot is lacking, there may even be serious grammatical errors.

So you maybe start to read a little bit about story writing, and take a course or a workshop, or join a forum, and BAM! Mind blown... there is so much to know! There was so much I was doing wrong!

As far as stages of development, I think there is a pattern that is common. Macro-Micro-Macro.

The new writer starts out thinking their idea is the most genius idea ever. But all they worry about is word choice.

1) I'm amazing. (You always can tell when someone is in this stage because they will corner you at a party and tell you about the tragic backstory of their character for an hour. Then they will thrill you with the creation of their world and the clever names of all the gods and how they were derived from combining ancient Mesopotamian and Vincan deities). You can always tell a more experienced writer, because if you question them on their project their response will be, "I don't know. Mostly crap."

2) If I make myself sound like X popular author, I will be even more amazing.
2) My sentences are boring. I must use a thesaurus to doctor up my words and make them fancy.
3) I need to learn about grammar and sentence structure. If I can just write better sentences and make them more descriptive than people will like my stuff.
4) Oh, crap. So it doesn't matter how fancy my words are, the story has to make sense? But it made sense to me!
5) Wait, stories have Structure? No! What the heck is a "hook"?
6) I know nothing. This is impossible. I will never write again. I obviously have no talent.
7) Huh, apparently, if I just learn some things, I don't need a ton of talent.
8) Magical stage of voice discovery. Hey! So this is what I sound like!

Etc, etc, etc.... with a lot of self doubt and gnashing of teeth thrown in for effect.

 

[Gabriella]

I've been in a holding pattern on stage 7 for a couple years! But it's not too bad. Beta readers were an eye-opener in the best possible way, because they had such constructive responses (I was lucky to find the ones I did).

I cycled through stages 1 through 6 fairly quickly--owing perhaps to having been an undergrad writing major and grad student in English. When I floundered in 4, 5 and 6 it was REAL. I really knew comparatively nothing about storytelling--compared to these young'uns who grew up on the internet with awesome writer communities.

No bother: I was a student so long that I know how to be humble and find a master or two. Oh, and finding a query pitch or logline is a new stage of humble when you start to wonder what you're really writing about. Stage 7.75.

 

[FifthView]

1) I'm amazing. (You always can tell when someone is in this stage because they will corner you at a party and tell you about the tragic backstory of their character for an hour. Then they will thrill you with the creation of their world and the clever names of all the gods and how they were derived from combining ancient Mesopotamian and Vincan deities). You can always tell a more experienced writer, because if you question them on their project their response will be, "I don't know. Mostly crap."

2) If I make myself sound like X popular author, I will be even more amazing.
2) My sentences are boring. I must use a thesaurus to doctor up my words and make them fancy.
3) I need to learn about grammar and sentence structure. If I can just write better sentences and make them more descriptive than people will like my stuff.
4) Oh, crap. So it doesn't matter how fancy my words are, the story has to make sense? But it made sense to me!
5) Wait, stories have Structure? No! What the heck is a "hook"?
6) I know nothing. This is impossible. I will never write again. I obviously have no talent.
7) Huh, apparently, if I just learn some things, I don't need a ton of talent.
8) Magical stage of voice discovery. Hey! So this is what I sound like!

The weird thing about this set of steps is the way they seem to turn upon/around outside expertise or evaluation, an exterior metric. I.e.,

2. Sound like THAT popular author
3. Steal fancy words from THAT thesaurus. (And THOSE other readers will find it fancy.)
4. Sense resides in THAT group of people, not me. Which is kinda vice versa what I thought.
5. Formalization, exterior rules others have long established...is the way to think about everything.
6. [I'm nothing. THAT popular author, THOSE fancy words, THOSE readers, THOSE formal rules and procedures are everything.]
7. Wait a sec, so I should just follow all of THAT and THOSE...make all THAT Me and Mine.

I'm not sure how I should characterize #8, heh. It's almost like the discovered voice isn't MY voice so much as whatever Mine is after it's co-opted or been co-opted by all the THAT and THOSE.

I'm not critiquing your list however. I'm just thinking that maybe...it doesn't quite answer the OP question of....

So.... what does "just enough to self-edit" mean for a writer?

I suppose then my question would be this combo:

Must all that exterior measure be learned before one can recognize what one's own writing IS?

Or can one learn to become objective about one's own writing without first going at it through the eyes of all others?

I do think that self-editing requires the ability to see one's own writing objectively. Learning the terms, structures, and so forth might help to introduce that objectivity. But I think that maybe lots and lots of reading in the genre you are writing might also serve as an objective measure. ("Meh, what I just wrote is OBVIOUSLY not as good as the last 10 novels, from other authors, that I've read....") Do we need to know the technical reason ("Hook") to begin self-editing? I doubt it—even if having these terms handy might help speed up the process sometimes.

 

[FifthView]

As an addendum...Auden's essay, "Making, Knowing and Judging" from his collection The Dyer's Hand might interest anyone following this subject.

Auden used as an example a novice poet and says that the novice must eventually develop an internal Censor.

The first step in the creation of that Censor is finding a master to imitate. In imitating that other poet, the novice learns various techniques for how things can be done—but importantly, not what must be done.

What must be done requires a kind of stubborn adherence to personal likes and dislikes, a very selfish (because very personal) metric, and it is often discovered as a result of novices getting together and sharing their work, reacting to one another's work, in a friendly but critical manner, when the masters aren't around. "I like this." "I don't like this." There may be a desire to please one's fellows but also an unbending desire to please oneself. I suppose this might be where Voice is developed.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yes, that was how my series of stages went.... from trying to copy a “mentor”, down through learning all the things you don’t know and trying to apply the “rules”, to suddenly saying, “screw it” and developing your own voice and style.

But you can only self edit as far as the stage you are in. You can’t ask someone in the thesaurus stage to start worrying about structure, or using symbolism... it just won’t work. They are not cognitive enough about their own story to see how it would work, or why.

 

[Devor]

This is the Ted talk I was referring to.

The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

 

[Svrtnsse]

1) I'm amazing. (You always can tell when someone is in this stage because they will corner you at a party and tell you about the tragic backstory of their character for an hour. Then they will thrill you with the creation of their world and the clever names of all the gods and how they were derived from combining ancient Mesopotamian and Vincan deities). You can always tell a more experienced writer, because if you question them on their project their response will be, "I don't know. Mostly crap."

The little sarcastic cynic in me would like to point out that this is the best thing it's read all day.

On a more serious note...

What's enough to self-edit?

I think it's really important to be able to detach emotionally from what you've written. It's easy to say you know your story has flaws. It's logical and reasonable and sensible. It's another thing entirely to accept that knowledge on an emotional level. It becomes easier with time, but at the start it's difficult.

It comes back to this part:

Self-editing in this case refers to, "I'm doing something wrong, let me change what I'm doing so I can grow in this skill."

You first have to accept there's stuff wrong. (This doesn't mean you're a bad person, or that you're a miserable failure. It does mean you've got room to improve and that all the time and effor you put into your story didn't pay off in the way you hoped to - but such is life.)

Once you've accepted that there are things wrong, you can try and figure out what.

One of the drawbacks of writing is that it's slow, and that getting feedback is difficult.
Rewriting a scene can take a long time, and they you'll need to get feedback on it. If you show it to someone who's already read it, they can compare it with the previous scene and say if it's worse or better, but they can't read it with fresh eyes like a new reader. If it's a scene later on, it'll be tricky to get new feedback as someone will have to read everything before it to really get what it's about.

In that way, self-editing becomes that much more important. Being able to figure out what doesn't work and how to fix it without consulting with an army of test readers is more or less a necessity.

Sorry, I got sidetracked by work and lost my train of thought. I'll get back to this when I'm home.

 

[Heliotrope]

I think that the emotional aspect is very important in this. Emotion is very much tied to the "growth mindset." The Ted talks speaker obviously is an advocate of the growth mindset, and believes he is capable of learning new things. He is not tied, emotionally, to what he produces. He knows that if he does something wrong during practice it is not a reflection of him as a person. He is not dumb, he is just 'learning.' I think that if you can be objective about your work, and realize that it is not lack of "talent" or "intelligence", but lack of "skill", then you can cycle through the learning process very quickly.

But, if your output is deeply connected to you sense of self worth, and you are emotionally tied to the process, and you have been raised to believe you " can't fix stupid", then it will take longer to get over the emotions that come with criticism, and it will take longer to be able to see the errors in your drafts.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I’m bad, but all this does is bring the Talking Heads’ “Psyco Killer” song to mind...

I can’t seem to type down the story
I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax
I can’t sleep ‘cause my lips are on fire
Don’t touch me I’m a real fictional liar.

Writer Babble

Qu'est-ce que c'est
Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah better
Run run run run run run run cover your ears oh oh
Writer Babble
Oh oh oh
yeah yeah yeah!

I now return you to your normal programming.

 

[Chessie2]

So.... what does "just enough to self-edit" mean for a writer?

Every writer is different, so the answer is "it depends."

This is purely my opinion, but I think it's important to remember that we're always growing as writers, and that it's a good idea to at least let one other person read our work. My views on this topic are pretty controversial on this site and I've gotten into trouble (lol) saying what I'm about to say: when you reach a certain level in your craft, you can pretty much rely on your creative intuition to guide you through the book writing process. This is why it's good to write as often as one can. Daily, several times a week, but practice is super important. The more we practice, the more confident we get in our abilities because we are growing in our craft by tackling our weaknesses and strengthening our, well, strengths.

After a writer reaches a certain level advice from other writers ceases to be as helpful as it once was. Since every writer is at a different level, one with less experience critiquing a manuscript written by a more experienced writer is not going to have good advice. Less experienced writers tend to focus on word choices and plot coolness instead of focusing on story. It doesn't matter that you have adverbs, there, was, then, etc. What matters is story, preferably one that is presented professionally to the audience of its intent.

Self-editing, however, is a skill EVERY writer needs. We have to be able to know what our strengths and weaknesses are in order to grow in our craft. If we always rely on other people's advice then we aren't listening to our creative voice, which knows far more than our conscious mind gives credit for. In the past, I had other writers crit my stories on things THAT DIDN'T MATTER like what words I used or if an idea was overused or whatever struck their fancy. I learned rather quickly that growing in my craft meant practicing daily (for me) and figuring out which issues needed the most addressing. After a while, I stopped relying on what I like to call the Peanut Gallery. No one knows my story better than I do, and if I fail then that's up to my readers to decide. Some like my books and others don't. It's all a subjective matter of perspective.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Chessie, Chessie, Chessie... Adverbs are weak shit, get over it. ::runs and hides:: Highly experienced writers and statistics say so, LOL. ::runs and hides again::

Now that said, from what I've read of your work, you really aren't that adverb-happy... unless compared to me, but then, Stephen King and Hemingway use more adverbs than I do. -ly adverbs are, however, great red flags for where to improve what you were trying to say.

 

[Chessie2]

Chessie, Chessie, Chessie... Adverbs are weak shit, get over it. ::runs and hides:: Highly experienced writers and statistics say so, LOL. ::runs and hides again::

Now that said, from what I've read of your work, you really aren't that adverb-happy... unless compared to me, but then, Stephen King and Hemingway use more adverbs than I do. -ly adverbs are, however, great red flags for where to improve what you were trying to say.

See, I don't think that matters. There are a lot of tools in the box and using them all allows us to express ourselves with creative integrity. Worrying about how many adverbs or was/were/then/but/etc we're putting in is baby BS that freezes writers and makes it difficult to get to the heart of their story. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

It's a matter of dosage, and target audience. And not all -ly usage is created equal. Some usage is justified. There is pointless, bad, and okay -ly... there are no examples of great -ly words I've ever seen... unless of course we create Chessiely... That MIGHT be a great adverb, heh heh.

Creative integrity good, but so many words are utterly pointless and over-used that writers need them pointed out. "That" is a flat-out infliction in wordy writing styles. Because it's necessary some of the time, doesn't mean all the time, heh heh.

My limited usage isn't conscious most of the time, it just came about by determining what I like and doing it. I was rather amazed that I just don't use many adverbs (even non -ly) in my writing. When I'm "on" when writing the only -ly adverb you'll see is in dialogue. There was another far more famous writer than me who said such a thing once, but I can't recall her name...

-ly adverbs do matter to some degree, not necessarily in sales... but, it's statistically backed up in some respects by Goodreads ratings of classics.

Oh, and stuff like "she ran quickly" just needs to pointed out if the TA is above YA... maybe even MG.

 

[FifthView]

there are no examples of great -ly words I've ever seen.

Are there examples of great article usage? ::runs and hides::

 

[Hallen]

Greetings Scribes

It's been my opinion for a while that there are "stages" to learning how to write, and that writing advice can sometimes be a bit off because it's geared for a different stage than the writer is in.

But.... what are those stages? I'm not entirely sure.

I think the 'stages' vary for each writer. The lists and discussions above is close enough.
I definitely think there is an "ignorance is bliss" stage where you think this isn't so hard and you write for hours producing some pretty good stuff -- as far as you can tell. And maybe those scenes are pretty good. But they are not a story. And they never will be because you really don't know what you are doing yet. Once you figure that out, you are at the stage where you are ready to learn.

That's when the hard work starts.

I think there is often a stage where people give up. You learn so many rules and processes that it leads to mental grid lock. You can't write because you think you are doing it all wrong. This comes from ignorance, but also because you are starting to see how to self edit.

I recently saw a Ted Talk about learning to be "good" at any skill in about 20 hours. According to the talk you need to learn "just enough to self-edit" and then focus on practicing. The idea is that you should be able to work against your mistakes, and not just run with them.

I think that means when you can go back and read something you have written a few weeks prior, that you can see the flaws. Very few people recognize issues if they write something one day, and then read it again the next day. I think you need to leave it sit for a few weeks prior to taking a run at it. And, I think that it's really difficult to do until you have had somebody else read your stuff and give you honest feedback -- preferably from another writer. Or, you read feedback provided to another writer, like on a forum like this, where you start to learn what to look for.

I'm not talking about grammar or spelling. I'm talking about perspective flaws -- my character couldn't possibly know this since they were not there when this happened. Continuity issues. Plot problems. Characters being out of character -- so to speak.

I think one does not reach this stage without understanding story structure, POV, and crating sympathetic characters amongst other things. There is a huge amount of information and styles there for sure. But the writer must start to understand how it fits together before they are ready to really self edit at the story level. I think that's gonna take a bit longer than 20 hours.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Are there examples of great article usage? ::runs and hides::

Only the "articles" in Playboy... I mean... umm... nevermind.