July 13, 2018 2:47 PM MDT
"Hope we hear more comments on others' attitudes on this editing subject"
Well, you asked...
"Internet wisdom" says that writers and editors may as well be completely separate species, because a person can be either a writer or an editor, but not both, because these are different skill sets (true) that use different sides of the brain (false: the "right brain/left brain" things is nonsense), and since no one can use both sides of their brain equally well (false) because every human is either right-handed or left-handed (false), no one can be both creative and logical (false), which means editors don't know anything about storytelling (false: have you kids not heard of developmental editors?), and writers are clueless about the "trivia" of spelling and grammar and word choice (false).
I love writing. I also love editing. (I'm ambidextrous, though, and have a neurological "glitch" -- note the use of quotation marks to indicate irony/sarcasm -- that makes me both creative and logical, so make of that what you will.) I love editing even when I am temporarily annoyed at having to make the same corrections over and over again, or much worse, when I'm not allowed to fix certain things that are objectively wrong because a publisher mistakenly thinks making those corrections would slow me down too much, and they're already behind schedule because the author took far longer than expected to write the novel... (It takes more mental effort on my part to ignore wonky sentence structure or inappropriate word choices than it does to just fix these things and move on.) Sometimes, correcting punctuation and whatnot is actually soothing. (Weird, right? And that reminds me: I haven't posted today's "Writing Glitch" on my blog yet.) My clone-sibling says it's because I'm a creature of chaos and thus need a lot of order in my life to balance that. (Obscure fiction-reference humor is my other superpower. ) Although developmental editing for other people is not easy for me (if I don't know the author and the author's intentions for the story, I can't make recommendations on how to guide the story in that direction), I do find that aspect of editing enjoyable when it's for my own writing (or my twin's -- not that there's any real difference after more than two decades of collaboration).