Good morning everyone,
Does editing as you go make you a terrible writer? There is no such thing as a terrible writer, only a writer who didn’t edit enough. Because there is no such thing as a bad story. Now, while many may tell you that editing as you go is a terrible idea and will make your edit sloppy and will only make your draft go slower and while for them this may be true, this is not true for everyone. I for one have a certain standard of editing. While I tend not to focus on the spelling and grammar so much, I cannot stand leaving a spelling mistake that I can see. If I can see the red squiggle then I have to fix it.
Now, I have a very good reason for this and it doesn’t slow down my pace at all, rather, it actually saves me the time of trying to figure out what the word was supposed to originally be. Because I’m right there in the moment and I know what the word is supposed to be. This makes me editing through next time much easier as I don’t need to shuffle through the whole page to figure out what word I was going for.
Now some people are perfectionists and cannot stop at that so for them it may be an issue to stop and edit because they will edit the sentence/paragraph/page to death only to find out at some point in the future they’ll be deleting the whole thing completely or is slows them down drastically and they never finish the first draft, let alone the second or third.
But I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing to do, just something that should be done carefully and with a clear boundary set in place of where the editing stops and you continue to do the creating part. Otherwise it can get in the way and prevent you from doing any of the actual writing. But as long as it isn’t a hindrance or not much of one, I don’t see any issues with it especially if it inevitably makes your job editing easier in the future.
I mean, I already admitted that I do it. I have to stop and correct a word if I notice it is spelled incorrectly. And I find it necessary for my own peace of mind and for ease of clarity later in the editing process.
So if you do some variation of this, it is totally fine and don’t listen to anyone who tells you you can’t or you’ll be a bad writer. You won’t be and you aren’t. I promise. You can always stop if it does become a hindrance or an issue.
I hope this helped some of you. Thank you so much for coming, for showing up and happy reading and writing! Lots of love! Until next time.
Celine Rose Marie
