Thoughts On Writing

I was in school before the personal computer. I had not seen a personal computer until I was in vocational school after I graduated. I had a strong interest in writing back then. My problem was I could not type worth a bean, Did not understand story development, hand wrote slowly, and was actually quite lazy.

Back then, editors had a rule of thumb. The work had to be typed perfectly, no mistakes. Also, the author had to be the one who typed it. If they learned that the author hired someone to type it with no mistakes, they would not even look at it.

At the time, I never fully understood why that was. I knew I could not type perfectly and would want to have it typed perfectly so it could be accepted by the editors.

While working on my rewrite of my Waxy Dragon Birth story, I can now see why editors of the time wanted the writing to be by the author.

As I am editing my story, I will start reading a little behind where I stopped to get into the swing of things and a feel for where I am going. Invariably, I will change several sentences, a word here, a phrasing there, as I go, before I pick up where I stopped working before.

Every time a writer re-typed a work, they changed sentences, improving the way their work was written. If someone else typed the work, the writing would not be as good as it could be.

I read recently somewhere, where a famous writing person said that if you are going to change your story, write it over, which indicated to start from scratch. We tend to avoid heavy writing by using as much of the old story as you can, pulling in the writing of the previous stage. His thought is that if you are making changes, write it from scratch and let the story become what it is supposed to be, rather than to let the old stuff hold the new work down.

In this editing of My Waxy Dragon story, I am adding whole scenes expanding ones I already have, changing much of what I had. If I started over on this rewrite of the Waxy story, rather than filling in, in between what I already had, It might have been better, a bit different, possibly cleaner, likely even less work. Instead, I am changing half the sentences as I filter through the piece. Using existing sentences is likely only saving me a quarter of my writing effort, if that.

I think the reason I am editing my piece, rather than rewriting it, besides not hearing about the concept before I started this editing run, is that there is the hope that there will be entire sections that will end up unchanged, saving me a lot of work. Of course, looking back so far, that has not happened. Also, I am using what I already wrote as a guide as to what I want to do and where I want to go with it. It is hard to do that with two text open.