Well, the editing died quickly. I’ve continued to ponder the issue while reading up on editing as much as possible. Doing this, I came across a blog post of Neil Gaiman’s in which he advises a young writer to write her next book instead of editing her first one. His argument was that she had learned too much from the actual writing to stop now and that she had no way of being sure, in her first throes of being a writer, that she would still want to publish the early story after a long series of edits.
This depressed me slightly until I saw a few other authors saying this. Apparently, but not surprisingly, the best way a writer learns is to write. Brandon Sanderson, my new idol, was only published on his seventh try. Apparently, that’s quick for a writer in this day and age. He’s made several comments on a podcast he cohosts entitled Writing Excuses about this phenomenon. I guess it’s time for me to start outlining my next novel.
For the time being, I’m leaving the first one behind. There’s a hard copy on my bookshelf and a digital copy in my laptop. I may never come back to it. I may harvest parts of it for later work, or I may rewrite it entirely later. For now, though, it will rest softly while I return to craft a newer, better one. I hope I learn as much from the next one.
