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Writing and Editing are Different Kinds of Magic


At heart, I’m a writer of fiction. I love everything about this intensely creative process: choosing between two almost equally perfect words, trying to name the word I am feeling in my bones, and accessing the subliminal that my brain usually shuts out in my daily life.


But I’m also an editor. I revel in arranging the arc of a narrative in my head before I turn on Track Changes in Word or Google Docs Suggest Mode and move around the sentences someone else has labored over, turning the sum of those moving parts into something better – clear, readable, flowing prose. I thrill in using line edits to cut through verbosity. I enjoy slashing extra words that dilute the meaning of the sentence. I use my skills to carve out sharp, powerful text, to make someone else’s work better than they ever thought it could be.


If someone asked me to choose between writing and editing, it would be impossible. I love them both with equal passion. However, they both satisfy completely different needs.


I write because I must.


I write to tell the stories I wish existed. Stories I wish I had read when going through particularly difficult periods of my life, stories that would have brought sanity and solace to the jumbled chaos of thoughts that clogged my brain like a giant hairball.


I write to live different lives through characters my body will never inhabit in this life I have been given.


And I write to make readers aware of the innermost feelings and thoughts that they might never dare to voice, to embolden them to go so far as to touch and feel the shapes of those thoughts, like a child gingerly touching a snail or a frog for the first time. Thoughts and feelings that I believe are a shared reality for us all, that hold within them the delicate contours of universal emotions.


I edit too, because I must.


Because I can’t face the chaos of a messy room without rolling up my sleeves, pulling out cleaning sponges and a trashcan, and starting to hack it into order.


Editing, to me, is like decluttering and organizing my home. When I conjure up my inner Marie Kondo and get into spring cleaning mode, I take stock of the contents of my drawers and closets. I consider and discard things that I don’t need any more, that don’t serve any purpose in the current context of my life. I scrub the dirt that lives in the forsaken corners of their home. I then take what’s left and rearrange it in the most logical way possible, giving everything a designated place in which it belongs.


In another life, I would have been a professional organizer, empowered by the emotional distance that’s natural while doing this for other people to straighten up their homes and remove the fluff and clutter they have hoarded over a lifetime of not knowing when to let go.


That’s what editing is like. As an editor, I organize other people’s thoughts and ideas to display the bare bones of who they are and what they think with the utmost clarity. To tell them firmly, I know you love this, but it’s time to let go. Trust me, you’ll love your home more when it’s gone. Press Delete and Move to Trash.

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