Jumping in With Both Feet - A Writing and Editing Lifestyle

One of the things I've found in the last year and a half of working on my stories is that I can't just dip a toe in. It's all or nothing. And I can only have one major project running at a time.

The reason is that a story is a lot like a mud puddle. You have to jump in with both feet to see how deep the mud is. You have to get absolutely coated in it. And that's how you know how much of a story you have, when you've surrounded yourself in your world building, you've got your mounds of research, your plotlines and all. But, if you're jumping in with both feet into the one mud puddle, you are also only testing the mud in one place at one time. You can't physically be two places at once. And figuring out that I can't be in two metaphysical places at once has certainly taken a lot of learning.

I had, up until last year, had a few stories going all at once. It divided my time and allowed me an escape hatch if one story seemed to be having trouble. And that's great, except I wasn't finishing things. Some things would go on the side burner permanently. Others, I'd probably get a few paragraphs in at a time -- wonderfully written paragraphs, but that's all they were.

You're not really getting muddy if you have a toe here, a toe there, and fingers in two other different puddles.

So, now, I have one story that I'm writing at a time. One puddle, ankle-to-neck deep. (At least, I keep hoping I won't find that I'm in over my head... ::winks::)

But what does this mean for editing? As I've said in my profile, I'm writing one story and editing two others. And that's a lot of mud to sling.

Ginny and I were talking about the best way to approach edits and I told her, I still believe it's about jumping in with both feet. There really is no best angle to get into it from, and it's hard to see just what kind of mess you have until you're knee deep in it again: then, you'll be able to see how much needs to be changed.

Even though I'm standing knee deep in my new story, and am still working towards the goals of my new story, I'm still coated -- metaphorically-speaking -- in the mud of my last two projects. And they've had time to soak in. But, I still make sure that I work on only one of those story edits at a time.

So, for each story, I jumped in. I did a read through. I made those changes I knew I needed off the bat. I marked places that I was unsure about, then I sent it out and set it aside and let it percolate. Each one in their own turn.

They're not done, of course, and won't be until they're published, but I have those pockets of mud mapped. They're on my radar. I'm not losing them, and while more rain refreshes them, they're still mine. I've left my mark on them and they've left their mark on me.

And distance, whether it had just been put aside after the first edit or sent out to friends to read and respond to my own comments, really has helped to create some clarity in things that had been, at the time, as clear as mud.

But you can't know until you jump in.

At least, that's my take on it.