I still have pages of fiction at home that have more red than black on them (I really like editing by hand when I want something to read really well). Unfortunately the red is very discouraging and that novel will likely never make it past the first two chapters.
Re:How to be a faster writer
by jonnathanson on Thursday August 11, 2011 @05:46PM
(#2874976)
When I was in high school, I spent a summer interning for a TV writer. It was laborious and menial work. Essentially, I would take his heavily redlined and annotated scripts, type up the revised versions, then drive them back to his house. Then I'd repeat this exercise the next day. At the time, I remember thinking what a chore it was, and wondering -- sometimes aloud -- why he didn't just save different versions in a folder on his computer, skipping the intermediate step -- me -- entirely.
At the end of the internship, he asked me what I thought of the script. And I found myself able to speak with candor, precision, and something approaching intimacy about the way it had evolved over the months I had seen it. At that point I realized that he had basically Miyagi-ed me. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. Etc. It was a humbling, but (in retrospect) cool experience.
Also, I find myself doing a lot of in-situ editing, as the article suggests. But rarely have I found that it's fully sufficient for work I really care about. And therein lies the rub: for 99% of my daily writing, the burst method works near-flawlessly. But for anything that I want to stand the test of time, a.k.a. publishable fiction or academic work, I will give the revision its fair course (and then some).