If I’ve learned one thing about myself over the years, it’s that I have a writer’s brain. It’s not quick off the mark and it needs time to think, frame and reframe. Writing is one of my favourite things to do and my favourite part of writing is when the ideas flow and you can’t write fast enough to capture them. I love it when characters become friends that you know and love as you follow them through the twists and turns they go through. I love escaping into a world of my own creation hoping that you will be able to share it with others some day.

There is, however, an aspect of writing I loathe, and that is the seemingly never ending road through the wastelands of the edit. Sometimes it feels good with the odd change here and there. The story feels like it flows from paragraph to paragraph and scene to scene. There are other times when everything is just bad and nothing flows and the situations you created now seem just plain dumb.

I see editing as the necessary evil. The process that sucks the joy out of your soul, but ultimately leaves you with something that is refined that is better to read.

Some edits are worse than others. I’ve just completed the fifth edit of Dream Weaver and it was a long hard slog. Previous changes I’d made were jarring and needed to be surgically removed while others needed completely re-writing. Berating myself for using this word or that word, or repeating passages and themes was a common occurrence.

So yes, a necessary evil, a drudge, a pain, a hard slog through wind and snow, uphill both ways. And yet I can see the progress with each draft. Each time I run through the story, it gains a new dimension – something I hadn’t thought about before. The characters become more fleshed out and more real. The edited story is like a photographic print in the developing fluid – slowly taking its final form and revealing the hidden details.

I’ve always been a fan of Lev Manovich’s treatise on Database as a Symbolic Form in which he discusses the difference between traditional media like books and movies (narrative) versus new media like video games (database). I’ve always thought of editing as the process of refining the database of all the story elements into the final narrative that sits on the page. It’s not exactly what he was getting at, but I like thinking of editing in that way.

Stephen King said, ‘To Write is human, to edit is divine.’

To me it will remain the necessary evil.