Editing and the idea of soft critique
Not everyone spends the same amount of time editing their work. However, editing is an important thing for an author to do. In my own experience, for writing a 10-page short story, I would spend about two hours with the actual writing, and at least four hours doing general revisions once I have had it reviewed and critiqued by someone else.
Writing processes differ across the board. Some people make revisions and edits as they work, and when they are finished with a rough draft, it might be much cleaner than someone else who writes non-chronologically and does not care about grammar their first go around.
There is nothing wrong with either of these writing processes, and many people’s processes fall somewhere in between these extremes. It is key to note, though as a writer, one must be very willing to complete the work for his or her writing. The editing and revising process is every bit as important as writing the actual work because, without a solid revision or edit, many people miss key discrepancies in their work.
Even of a person only writes for his or her own purposes or circle of friends, the author’s ethos is carried by the work and directly impacted by how coherent, original, and gripping it is.
As an aspiring writer or author, finding your writing style is imperative to effective editing and revisions. To do this, it might also be a good idea to find a reader base, not for adoration purposes to feed the author-ego, but to pick apart a story and point out its strengths and weaknesses.
When I attended college, I was made aware of the existence of what I refer to as “soft critiques.” These are critique sessions where writers get together to read each other’s works and critique them. The catch is that these sessions are only allowed to give positive feedback. Positive feedback has its perks, definitely, but an entire weekend workshop of writing when all you get are positive critiques? Is that actually helpful to your writing?
There is a reason professors ask students to give each other feedback on what their classmates did well in addition to things that did not go so smoothly. Having both sides of the spectrum help the student whose work is getting critiqued understand what parts of a piece of writing he or she needs to elaborate on, what parts did not make sense to a larger audience, and what parts may have lacked supportive research.
Giving positive feedback does not accomplish any of this, in my experience. I feel that most people have at some point in their writing career received a critique from one or several people in the group that explored all the good points and could find little to no fault with the writing. Positive and negative critiques not only help the author but also help the critic develop analytical and critical thinking skills, since it takes more effort to point out places in a text that need work and how the writer can go about fixing them than it does to tell a writer that it’s all good.
