We’re Going For the “How To Edit…” Workshop
FULL STEAM AHEAD…
After some dithering around because of almost no initial response, we had people today tell us they wanted the How To Edit Your Own Work workshop, but were planning on taking it later.
And that is enough to make us realize the workshop is worth our time in trying to help writers not kill their own work.
So the workshop is a go.
We will take sign-ups for any point that it is on the schedule through August and it will join the regular workshop rotation after that.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Appreciated.
9 Comments
Mary
Oh, thank goodness! I’d love to take it but there’s no funds for quite a while for me to do so. I’ll grab it once my funding is available. Thanks Dean!
Chong Go
Hurray! (June is going to be crazy, so I’ll sign up for July.)
Linda Maye Adams
Yay! I’m definitely in. The question is how my energy levels are, which have been all over the place since I broke my foot.
I can see why writers would reluctant though. Almost everywhere, revising and editing are used interchangeably, though they are two different tasks, and editing itself has different types underneath it.
But an example where NOT editing can cause revision: I was writing a thriller, and we hit this point in the story where we couldn’t figure out to do. We should have done EDITING to troubleshoot the problem, like go back a few scenes and see if we went in the wrong direction, or check further back and see if something else that we’d done had caused us to go aground. Like maybe we put X in here, and the subconscious was going, “Okay, I need to do Y now because X is in there.” And if X wasn’t in there, it’d be different. So we decided to fix the problem in the revision and forged on ahead and finished the first draft.
“Fixing in the revision” are dangerous words! When I started revising, I hit that scene. It took a lot of work to fix, as in many, many, many revisions. I had to go back first to get what had broken it fixed first, then then fixed the scene, which in turn broken many things after it. I fixed those, and that broke many more things, and fixing those broke many more, in turn causing more revisions. Writers do not realize that many of the reasons their story is broken in the first draft is that they are doing things that cause it to be broken!
B
Oh, yeah I am definitely taking that! I’m so glad you’re still going forward with it because the editing part has always been my downfall. I just have to work it into my budget cause I’m also slowly paying for all those strength workshops too.
Julie
This sounds like a great workshop and a very timely one for me. Is it not now running in May?
dwsmith
Yes, on the schedule for the next four months, starting in May. Full speed ahead.
Scott Gordon
That is great to hear! I’ll be signing up for the next available workshop. Once I drive back to Florida (sometime next week) I’ll pay for the class and start preparations.
Holly
I also want to take it as soon as I can line up the funds!
Ken
This is probably a good idea. I know how unenthused you’ve been about self-editing, but I think a lot of people are going to do it – mostly due to financial concerns – and some guidelines and best practices would probably help them in this. I think this would be pretty popular.