Endless editing
I often grapple with whether a scene or chapter is done. I edit, edit, edit, and then I get exhausted.
Hi Friends and howdy to my new subscribers!
Today’s newsletter is about editing. How do you know when to move on? This doesn’t just pertain to writing my memoir. I also struggle with this when writing personal essays or even newsletters for my Substacks.
I share a loose guideline for what has helped me, and from a broader scope, how I view editing, now that I’m on a break from writing my memoir.
I wasn't very concerned with editing when I started writing my memoir a few years ago. I focused on the story and wrote as much as possible. I was like… I. must. write. as. much. as. possible.
I even joined NaNoWriMo a few Novembers ago and banged out 75,000 words. I thought, yeah! I’m on a roll. And I was… until I hit a wall called editing (and structure, but that’s a whole ‘nother beast).
In hindsight, my perception of the memoir-writing process was a bit naive because I figured I could write, edit, hire an editor to help me, and voila, done.
In reality, I was writing, editing, changing everything, getting more confused, which then caused me to write everything out of order because I wasn’t sure how to edit the parts that were already written.
As I continued, I realized that writing a book—specifically a memoir—is complicated and emotional. There’s the part about telling your story authentically, what to leave in and cut, the potential trauma of reliving moments you wanted to forget, and so on.
I thought I knew the story I wanted to tell. However, after joining writing groups and classes to help with structure, I felt like maybe I didn’t know what I wanted to convey. The feedback I received helped me, but also confused and overwhelmed me.
While I learned a lot about structure, the part I wasn’t prepared for was how much editing I had to do. Writing and rewriting the same scenes felt daunting, especially because some parts changed drastically. I began questioning whether certain parts (or maybe the whole thing) were enough for the reader to stay engaged and connected.
So many times, a scene started off one way, and then someone in class would say, “Claire, I think this is what the scene is about.” Then I’d think, “Oh, it is?” And I’d revise the crap out of it.
I’m not saying I changed everything each time I got feedback, because sometimes, suggestions weren’t relevant or helpful. But there were moments when someone’s suggestion changed the way I viewed the piece, which was great.
But honestly, after a while, I started wondering when my scene felt fully complete. I thought, OK, I edited it as best I could. Can I move on? Or are there still holes to fill?
As someone who struggles with this, I’m curious how you deal with this issue.
How do you know when to move forward? What is your editing process?
After many starts and stops, changing and rewriting my story (and a lot of frustration), and asking my writing teachers and peers, I devised parameters and a loose guide for how I view editing.
This has helped me stay focused and minimize feeling overwhelmed. It’s still difficult to know whether something is done (maybe nothing is ever 100% done?), but having a process for editing has helped me when I feel unsure.
1. Set goals for edits
Depending on where I was for a specific piece, I gave myself small goals for what to check and edit. I started setting a very specific purpose for what I wanted my edits to accomplish.
These are a few examples of edit goals:
Peer feedback edits/changes
Tone
Clarity of what is happening in the scene—does the reader understand what all the characters are doing and saying?
Order of thoughts and events—is it cohesive, and does it convey what I am trying to say?
Succinctness and removing sentences or parts that are too wordy
2. Set boundaries
Going back and editing something more than a handful of times feels like I’m inching towards that dreaded endless loop.
So, even though I don’t necessarily keep count if I find myself editing something more than a handful of times and still not sure if I’ve done enough to convey the message and the “why” in the piece, I move on.
Even if I had to go back to it later, giving myself some space from it (I like to say, keep it movin’) was the only way I stayed sane.
This was especially relevant when I had to edit and re-edit the not-so-fun parts of my life that were traumatic and painful. But I also realized how healing it can be to revisit scary memories. I gained clarity and insight that I would’ve never been able to achieve, say, if I just wrote about it in my journal or just talked about it with my therapist.
Buuuut, I have my limits and I’m only human, so started to understand when I felt emotionally depleted—which meant, move on to the next scene.
3. Recognize diminishing returns
At a certain point, I realized certain edits were only slightly altering the meaning rather than significantly improving it.
I started asking myself if these changes were meaningfully serving my overall story. I spent many writing sessions resulting in “diminishing returns,” where I focused on clever dialogue or vocabulary rather than progress.
As an avid memoir reader, I often reminded myself that my favorite books were written rather plainly, almost like the author was having a conversation with me.
4. Set a timer
I like to set timers when I write. Sometimes, I wrote and edited for 25 minutes or 45 minutes, and there was a long period when I could only muster 15 minutes.
Using a timer gave me a sense of urgency not to get fixated on trying to develop the most divine description for a place or what someone was wearing.
Knowing I was on the clock helped me stay focused on my goal for editing. When the timer went off, it was easier to mentally note how much progress I made and what I spent my time on.
5. Let go
Letting go has kind of become the universal theme of my life. I’ve gotten better at being kinder to myself and improving my inner dialogue, which has helped me as a writer.
Knowing when to stop questioning whether something is done is a balance between refinement and letting go. I remind myself that no amount of editing will make my book just right.
Step away
As writers, we all know that the best kind of editing comes with time and the ability to walk away for a few hours, to sleep on it, or in my case, go on hiatus from writing my book. At first, I felt bad about it. I spent so much time writing and editing and trying to push forward. Not writing felt like I was intentionally failing.
But I’m starting to see this break as another version of editing. Stepping away hasn’t stopped the work—it’s shifted it to the background and allowed my story to reshape itself.
These days, I find myself “editing” in quiet moments—on a walk with my dog, when I’m driving, or listening to another memoir.
Thanks for asking! I wrote my first two memoirs with a writing group, so I was presenting six pages a week. Before our meetings, I'd polish those six pages, so the writing itself was very clean. Then I hired a developmental editor for my first book, and he gently suggested a complete re-structuring. I had written in a journalistic style, with each of ten years its own section. Not only did this come across as tedious to a reader, but the dramatic arcs were buried in the middle of chapters. So, I restructured, using what I was learning about fiction - hero's journey and all that. Those same beats are in our real lives - it's all in how we present them. I worked in some suspense between chapters and some foreshadowing. I didn't have to do a lot of re-writing, but a fair amount of rearranging. Mine was about owning a restaurant, and I realized the reader didn't care - for example - whether a particular customer came in in April or October, so I was able to group things together for a more cohesive narrative while still telling the truth. The result was so much better.
Now I'm working on the second one. In the first draft I just wrote the whole story from 1969-1980. Now I have to cut it down and keep it more or less on theme. It's like the artist who told a student that sculpting an elephant out of marble is easy - you just remove everything that isn't an elephant.
Finally (for now), I worry about over-editing. This is particularly true of poetry, where too much wordsmithing can suck the life out of the original.
I can empathize with this! I really admire memoir writers because your stories are so personal that it only makes sense that you want to tell them properly. With fiction, I try not to be so precious about editing. Readers are going to love or hate the fundamentals of your writing (voice, style, premise), and no amount of sentence tweaking is going to change their minds on that.
I'm currently editing my third novel and following this process: re-read the entire thing and make notes to myself on what I want to fix, organize that into a story spreadsheet with the timeline and beats laid out so I can see any gaps, and then create a revision plan in a kanban board. I tag every chapter as either an easy, medium, or hard revision (color-coded by green, yellow, or red) and now I'm chipping away at the revision plan one chapter at a time.
By now I can tell when I've gotten lazy in my drafting because I tend to summarize what I need to describe in scene. I'm an underwriter, so editing for me is about adding word count. I'm *so* glad that I chose to draft 4 novels before I started to publish them because it's much easier to edit in between releases than starting from scratch. I feel like everybody's first book is always the hardest and most time-consuming, but once you get a repeatable process down, it does get easier!