October 2, 2010
Conscious Creative Editing
Recently I agreed to do editing for different individuals and groups to test my skills and update them. They were asking me to do more than grammar and spelling. One group wanted me to take transcriptions from talks and turn them into usable material for newsletters. An author wanted a critical eye to test the strength and creativity of her work in progress.
Editing can be far more creative than standard vacuuming for errors. I read a text like it’s a book I’ve chosen to read and then I think if the characters are what I want them to be. I trail them and decide on what basis I like or dislike them. Are their actions interesting? Can I really believe in them, for even fantasy can win us into belief? Would I recommend this to a friend and why or why not? Do transitions easily move the text along and are the paragraphs divided in a way as to make it effortless reading? Is this paragraph boring the heck out of you?
Some fixes are easy enough, such as alternating the voicing between active and passive or changing from narrator to third person. But these will cause the author to do a lot of rewriting. Although this might be resisted, my services (paid or not) are to help this person get a read from a publisher. I sent my suggestions to the writer and they were accepted.
As for editing transcriptions, this is a totally different way of thinking for me. The speaker is not meant to be fictional and, in this case, English is not their first language. So I had a lot of creative license to use. This would have been harder for me had I not known this person’s work. But it’s not that difficult to imagine what a person means, so I just pretended I did and figured they would correct me if I’m wrong.
My task was to take one talk and make it into two articles. Two themes were interwoven and I teased them apart by doing a lot of cut and paste into a second screen. Then I found opening and closing remarks from their talk. I created smooth transitions. I then did a another edit with an eye to making the two balanced in length. I left it for 2 days, read it again and found a couple of errors and then I was done. It was accepted.
Two questions I asked myself. Why did this feel creative to me? Because, to participate in another’s thoughts, I moved outside of my own and stretched. It was akin to taking a slate that was already in progress and then adding to it. I was doing my own writing. Secondly, why do this? Because editing has helped me be aware of how others might view my own writing. Even when I’m writing for myself I’m thinking out loud and sloppiness does not encourage beauty in thinking. Some philosophers say there is another self watching us. The watcher is a good editor.
Conscious, creative, editing, writing, fiction, newsletter, transcription
