EDITOR@WORK: Writing vs. editing

Friday, June 17, 2016

Writing vs. editing

It's funny, but most people say that I'm better at writing about editing than I am about writing about writing.

They say that writing and editing are different; they're apples and oranges.

And they say they want to learn to write, not edit.

It's true that I write better about editing than I do about writing. I know it well. (I know writing well, too, but stay with me.)

Writing and editing are NOT different; they're two parts of the same process.

Novelist James Michener said that he was an okay writer, but he was a terrific re-writer (I'm paraphrasing here). He got his story/book/whatever down on paper and then went back and edited, edited, edited. And he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first book, ''Tales of the South Pacific,'' a collection of stories he began while he was in the Navy during World War II.

When I was a newspaper man, I wrote quickly, finished it, then went back and fixed it. If I didn't have time to edit, my writing was OK; if I had time to edit, sometimes it was really well done. (I still write this way; I'm just not a full-time newspaper man.)

Like you, I wanted to be a writer, not an editor. But I learned that I have terrific editing skills, and that makes me a better writer.

Write on.

EMAIL: tgilli52@gmail.com BLUESKY: PROFILE