Editing While Writing

Every writer has been told never to do this. Every editor, professor, teacher, or person in the field has always told writers to never do this. It’s one of the biggest carnal sins. They say to never edit while you write. They say to pound out your draft first, then go through and write a second draft, a third draft, and to never revise as you go along.

I believe this is bull crap.

When I was a teenager, I came up with a way to write drafts of novels that not only allowed me to know and remember where each chapter ended and started, but also allowed me to build on them as I continued to write. I would write five chapters at a time, pounding them out between four and six in the morning, then get out of bed and get ready for school. Before I pounded out those chapters, I would read the five previous ones, edit them, and then continue to write. This not only saved me a lot of headache if I found a loophole at the end of a draft while writing the second draft, but it also made sure that each draft was tighter and closer to my vision.

Editing as you write helps build on the story, helps correct your mistakes, and helps you to know where every part starts and ends. This isn’t just for grammar or for small accidents. This for checking on your characters, expanding on details, and helping correct plot points before the mistakes and accidents get out of hand.

Now, my first full-fledged novel is far from being completed — thank you, hospital stays —, but the same thing works for short stories, and for the same reason. It might be easier for some people to write shorts, and for other people, harder, but there are a few key reasons to edit while you write, and sometimes your first draft is completely finished before you sit down to edit.

For me, it’s always been simple enough to sit down, pound out about six hundred words of a first draft, then go back and add whatever I believe I need to. Whether that’s background information, context, or any other description, that’s for your story to decide. It might also be how characters relate to each other, their surroundings, or the conflicts. 

A second draft doesn’t have to be a complete rewrite. 

It could be a copy and pasted version of the previous draft, but with updates and an expansion that could only happen if you started off with a short of six hundred words, more or less.

One may think of this as a combination of revising at editing, by sort of doing both at the same time. It also combines writing into this as you’re expanding your story around one or two scenes that you already wrote, knowing you were going to add more later.

Continuing to do a combination of all three per draft will help you find your own soul to your own story. Before you ever hand it over to someone to read, you must make sure you’re proud of your own work and that it’s what you want it to be. It cannot become what it’s meant to be until you’ve fully ensured that your work is what you want it to be and what the work itself wants to be. The best way to do so is by combining writing, revising, and editing together, creating a triad of creation and completion, allowing you to work on the work, draft after draft, adding and deleting until the story itself is done by your own eyes.

Combining the three acts creates freedom in how you write by more easier allowing you to delete what must be deleted or add what must be added. And, if you never hand over your draft until it’s ready, you’re making more sure your story is becoming what you want it to be.

To learn to edit while writing, or edit and write at the same time, will open more doors for sound, mood, theme, and however your craft wants your work to be. Rather than having many, many, many different stages, the stages turn into each draft, rather than the stages being treated as separately: writing, then revising, then editing. This brings more freedom in the work as you’ll know how and why each draft is different, and what you’ve added or deleted to turn it into what it wants to be. 

Each draft now becomes written and rewritten, and the more this is practiced, the better it becomes. You learn your style, your voice, and your belief system surrounding the written word. It helps you come into your own as a writer, and it teaches how each draft is an evolution of your craft. Combining writing, revision, and editing will help build a stronger story, one that only you could write.