"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."- Samuel Johnson from Sunday 19th June 2005

This was yesterday's quote of the day on google.com/ig. I dutifully copied it down and felt I'd most likely use it for today's blog entry. The whole editing process has made me think long and hard about this quote.

I've sat there meticulously going over my writing, looking at it through a microscope, so to speak, trying to identify mistakes and places I've been superfluous, checking through every part of the editing process. It begins to make you hypercritical of all things. I can't even read a novel while I'm neck deep in this editing process. I cast my sharp eye over everything and think of more effective ways to use the language, to say what the writer is trying to say. It's like I become another person. Hubby doesn't even like living with me while I'm so far into the editing process. I need to keep going, though until the job is done. Then I can let the editor take a rest. He's good at his job and I call him out for it whenever it's time, but he tends to dominate all of life instead of keeping his opinion just to my writing.

For me, the only way I can really find a way to edit effectively is to give myself time. The longer I leave a piece of writing the cooler I will feel towards it when I let the editor loose. That's what makes this kind of writing, blogging, so dangerous, so self-exposing. The editor gets a brief glance at it, but I let it out there before I allow him much more. He does often demand I fix little mistakes he notices later, but in general he's learning to be more liberal with my letting writing go. And I suppose the lowering of editing standards in general has something to do with this principal.

I do feel editing has a vital role to play in any writing, though. I'm not one to believe for an instant that what I've written is so precious it couldn't be written far better than the way I did the first time the words slip through my fingertips. I believe in asking for advice, getting other opinions. There's nothing healthier for a writer than to get another view on your work. It doesn't mean you have to take all the advice given or receive all the opinions offered. Not everyone is correct, either. You learn how to balance what others say against what you set out to achieve in a piece of writing. It must be true to what you originally set out to show, explain or reveal.

As for Samuel Johnson's quote; I can't say that I 100% agree with him. If there is a part of your writing that feels great to you, but serves no other purpose than to simply make you feel good, then perhaps it would be wiser to strike it out, as he suggests. But there are times you feel good about something you've written because you feel the resonance of the truth in it. You got it right and you advanced your story, revealed character, or did something else to improve your story. Getting to know the difference between the two is what experience teaches you, I suppose.

I'm sitting here waiting for the last moments to tick by on the clock. There goes the last snick snuck of the second hand. I'm done for tonight.