Editing

At the Fall mini residency, I realised for the first time what editing is. After years of getting my students to edit their compositions and editing other people's work, I think it was only then I realised what it meant to edit, in the sense of re-writing and re-crafting.

Some tips I picked up:

1. Write on screen, then re-write long-hand, then type it out
2. Re-write taking inspiration from another writer (e.g. David Foster Wallace), just to see where your story goes
3. Don't be afraid of doing seemingly random things to your story, just to see what will happen to it.

The mystical idea of the story 'knowing where it wants to go' and the tussle between instinct vs intellect stayed with me after the residency, and I tried looking at It through that lens. I thought it would take one night, two at most, but it took three. It was more emotionally draining and exhausting than I thought it would be. When I tried to do the same thing to 'Next', I found that I didn't know where to take the story further, so I changed POV. I  still think there's something wrong with the story though -- no depth, something. For the Cat story though, I've looked at it so many times that I honestly don't know what to do with it. It's some sort of paralysis and tiredness, I think. I'm guessing something is wrong with the shifts in POV, or the fact that we spend so long in the girl's head.