As an author, editing has become an old friend - one I think most of us have a love/hate relationship with. It's necessary regardless of what level of skill one has. Without the final stage of editing our work may not be as professional and polished as we would like. Which isn't to say it isn't a painful endevour, it can be.
Personally, its something I tended to start doing as soon as I opened the manuscript and started back at page one to get my mind into the writing. Since I know there just isn't enough hours in a day to do 70K, I often save and come back to the manuscript. As a pantser (I'll discuss in another post) I rarely have a map of what I'm writing. I usually start with the premise and go from there. So, I have to breeze through before I get down to writing the next chapter. This means often times I'll find things I question, leaving little notes on the side of the manuscript.
However, as I have found over time, editing as you go is not something I could do with the level of success I wanted to get. It often changed the story to the point where the idea was so twisted and moulded by the end it wasn't even what I'd envisioned. Am I the only one who feels like this? No, by no means am I alone in this. I've spoken to other authors who have said the same thing or variations of it.
Editing as you go is a destructive habit, in my humble opinion. If you can do it, kudos to you, but my brain won't work that way. I spoke to an author one time at length about this, and her words were profetic. If you're editing from the start every time you open the manuscript, how can you say you're finishing the piece? You spend so much time editing the first chapter(s) or pages and you lose sight of what is happening with the rest of the story.
The old adage of "You can't edit a blank page" is very true. To edit and polish, there must be something on the page, otherwise, you're not editing. But, when you think about editing, the last thing I'd recommend is editing as you go.
There are several reasons why I say this. Firstly, if you're editing as you go along, are you really gaining ground? The human brain is an amazing thing, we're able to do a lot of things because we have such a powerful inner computer. But, even the most experienced author cannot look at something they've just written and see anything wrong with it. Why? Because we see what we want to see when we're editing as we go along.
This isn't something we can change, though we can be a bit more aware of it.
