One of the “rules” I’ve seen around is not to edit or revise as your write. It leaves writers to race through the draft and deal with a more worse problem:
I’ll fix it on the revision.
Last week, I hit about 10K on my science fiction novel Sinhollow, and I realized I had a problem. One of the characters wasn’t working. I included her initially because I wanted to make sure I have enough women characters. I didn’t want my heroine to be the only woman.
My choices were to leave the character in and deal with it on the revision, but I know that’s a way that leads to a whole lot of unnecessary work (having gone down that path before). I spent about an afternoon pulling her from the scenes and adding new dialogue. Wasn’t all that hard to do. But if I’d waited until the story was done, a lot more would have been tangled up, and each change would have rippled into other changes that would have in turn caused other changes.
And it made me think about the character, because I didn’t want to get rid of her. So she has a new role, and I’m going back to add scenes.
Not revision. No editing. It’s creating.
I usually edit as I go. Well, before I start writing again. Saves time, and I might forget it later.
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It does save a huge amount of time. I usually start cycling by going over what I last wrote, or in the case of right now, I’m moving back to add a scene that I realized is necessary (that other character again).
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