Something has been bouncing around my head lately.
You know how there’s this advice going around that basically all “experts” agree on, to finish your draft before you start editing?
It’s a solid advice since editing slows you down and you might need to tell yourself the story in full first before you know how to edit it.
Despite agreeing with this advice, I have been consistently breaking it and I’ve always felt guilty about it, blaming my slow progress on this unhealthy compulsion to edit.
But.
What if it isn’t a bad thing?
This got long
Hear me out.
The stories I’ve written while following this type of advice were the ones I wrote in a rush - for NaNoWriMo, for ONC, etc. And what do they all have in common? I’m not happy with those first drafts. Each one has to be completely rewritten from scratch.
Lately, I’ve been prioritizing my mental wellbeing and lowered the pressure I’ve put on myself before to write write write. As a result, my progress is slow. The past few weeks, I’ve gone over previous chapters to edit them a lot more than adding new ones because that’s all my tired brain has been able to handle. And there’s a constant result of this new habit: the story is taking a very solid shape.
It’s become my natural process now. I read back or listen to a chapter and notice that something feels off. This “off” feeling usually leads me to the character’s mental state. It’s not consistent when compared to what happened prior. They’re not processing previous revelation or are reacting to it inconsistently with their established patterns.
And so I fix these scenes. It’s usually a small change, could be as little as two lines but it makes a huge difference.
But most importantly, that little change has the potential to affect all scenes going forward. And so if I kept writing and not fixing that earlier problem, everything going forward would be off and would require even bigger revisions. And I’ll tell you, when every chapter you wrote feels off, it makes you think that the entire story is off and you need to fix the whole idea. And that’s how complete rewrites are happening. Rewrites that could be avoided if I took a step back during the writing process to make those little fixes.
So, what if this edit while you write process isn’t so bad? If the end result is a story that flies properly from chapter to chapter, then maybe it’s worth it to write it slowly like this? Maybe this is the process that works for me?
And it makes sense too. I’m not just a compulsive editor. I’m also a compulsive planner. So I DO already know what story I’m telling when I write it. So the whole reason for no editing because you don’t know what the full story is, it no longer applies.
And so I’m going to stop beating myself over this habit. Instead of writing fast and needing tons of edits/rewrites later, I’m writing slowly and carefully but in the end will (hopefully) need fewer edits.
(never mind that this scene is just in a lonely document without enough words around it to be considered a “book” yet) 
