What is Writing?

What is writing?

Is it putting a pen to paper? Is it a series of squiggles formed to make coherent letters, then words, then sentences?

Is it telling a story?

And what about editing?

Is it a completely different job? Is it something that someone does to your story to make it better? Is it red ink blots all over your precious work of fiction?

Maybe you think, "Hey, I'm a writer, dang it. I write. Editors have jobs for a reason. They're there to do all my editing for me."

Actually, they're not.

You see, if you want to be an author, published and read, then you have to be both. The author AND the editor.

Editors catch things that are inconsistent or spelled wrong. They might catch a comma in the wrong place, or a missing period. <- no pregnancy puns, please. They know where you need to expand or remove, but they don't know your world like you do.

That, and how annoyingg is it, to, read, this. Like, seriusly? Now, imaGine trying to edit, this. An entire book, like this. Yup. This. Annyong right? I know. You don;t have to tell, me twice.

OK, so maybe the above is a bit overboard. But the fact still remains, editors are professionals. For all intents and purposes, they are perfectionists when it comes to writing. To read something with excessive mistakes would be the emotional equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

My point here is that if you want to be taken seriously you have to know how to edit. Ask anyone that's published, they re-wrote their book a dozen times. Either that or they edited to shreds as they went along. But before they submitted to an agent guess what they did?

THEY WENT BACK AND EDITED.

Writing and editing -- they're like peanut butter and jelly.

Ying and Yang. Lucy and Ethel. Pink and purple. Cake and ice cream.

Get it?

They link arms and skip down the sidewalk belting the chorus of Michelle Branch's song "We Belong Together."

To sum this all up: you have to be an amateur editor to be a successful writer.