![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
As a follow-up to a recent aside on the importance of backups, let’s find out what value you subconsciously place on your work. Today’s poll (in the sidebar) asks “Do you back up your writing?”
I’m assuming, since you’re using a computer or similar electronic device to read this, that you’re using a computer or similar electronic device to write. If you’ve developed some romantic delusion that you can only write using a battered Royal No. 10 typewriter, or that Mont Blanc pen you got as a retirement gift instead of a pension, then imagine the expression “back up” means “write/type another copy”.
(I heartily advocate handwritten backups, as time spent copying is time not spent writing.)
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I heartily advocate handwritten backups, as time spent copying is time not spent writing.
Hah-but!
Problem here: This process would inevitably lead to a process of secondguessing and dictionarypage flipping known to a select few as ‘editing.’ Now, I understand that this act prevents the penwielder from composing anything new,* but it does increase the writer’s chances of publication (or so I’ve heard; I have yet to break out of “The Unfinished”, but am a future member of “The Canon” frr-shrr!). Would the achievement of publication not then, Sir, encourage more ‘Creative Expression?’
*Used in the Biblical “there’s nothing New under the sun, but even if there were you wouldn’t come up with it” sense.
Editing is a vastly more fruitful endeavour than writing. Making changes while copying results in something known as a “second draft”. I wish more writers were familiar with the concept.
The endless “editing stage” is exactly what a write needs to convince them to stop. That inner editor gets to yapping, telling them how horrible their work is…it’s hard to keep writing when faced with such horror. I’d say that many writers are disillusioned until they can no longer function by the writing process.
And if, by some horrific coincidence, they complete a second draft, well, at least they’re doing better than Anne Rice and her refusal to let herself be edited.
Heather, I’m just commenting so you don’t kill the thread.