thoughtjunkie

So, at Ghost Comma today, I said something amounting to "I think the ability to edit is more important than the ability to write." Naturally, everyone jumped on the ZOMG WTF CHRISTIAN IS WRONG bandwagon. Meh. It happens.

Here is what I was trying to express.

I see the fundamental difference between Writing and Editing as this: Writing is inherently a creative process (inasmuch as it can be-- we all know the "Nothing is truly original" spiel). Editing is a process of refinement. (I believe this semantic difference is where most GC people held difference with me).

Writing is building a house. Hollowing out and cementing out the basement; erecting walls and injecting insulation and laying drywall; figuring out which internal walls will be load-bearing; and then roofing the whole thing. You're not *actually* creating anything-- just rearranging existing materials into what you want.
Editing is renovating it. There's the basics for a plumbing system, but they lack faucets. There needs to be furniture everywhere, and paint, and (if it's meant for kids to play in) those little covers over the light sockets.
Same thing with stories. Writing is making something someone can live in. Editing is making it somewhere people want to live.

Now, let's say, the room needs a half-wall to tie it together. No problem, right? You get to work setting it up, and yes. You're building something. But no one would say it's on the same measure as building a whole house. It's construction with the end of refinement, rather than with the end of creation.
Same thing with writing a story vs. writing a scene for a story. It's not necessarily that the magnitude is different, but rather that they're two different processes-- someone writing a story is concerned with theme and characterization and plot; someone writing a scene is concerned with the clarification of said theme, characterization, and plot.
Honestly, it's just equivocation on the word 'writing'. One is cap-W Writing (as in, creating a new environment) and the other is lower-case-w writing (the physical act of stringing words into sentences, in a to-be-read medium). So yes, writing is sometimes required in the editing process, but never Writing.


Now that we can move past the semantics, my actual argument is this:

1) First-draft writing is rarely (if ever) as good as it can be.
1.a) Writing, barring major overhaul of a piece, is only really an applicable skill to the first-draft of a piece.
2) Editing is the process of altering an existing work.
2.a) Knowledge of how to edit well is knowledge of how to alter it to a given purpose effectively.
2.b) The (typical) goal of editing is making the existing work better (in some definition).
3) Good writing is better than bad writing (ohh, I'm living on the edge with that comment).

Therefore, Since knowledge of how to Write very well will yield a few good pieces, and many mediocre pieces; and Since knowledge of how to edit very well will yield pieces of generally higher quality: A highly capable Editor will yield better pieces than a highly capable Writer.


It should be noted that yes, pieces need to be created before they can be edited.
Now. I have never been arguing that people should only learn how to edit, and have no skills whatsoever in creating their own stories-- I don't see how I could possibly stand behind such a position. I'm simply saying that a focus on the ability to edit and revise will yield higher quality manuscripts than the ability to Write.

To sum-up:
Someone who knows how to make a gun and no idea of how to use it can still kill people with it. But someone who practices his/her aim is going to kill a lot more people.
Killingest of all, is someone who knows how a gun operates-- understands the mechanisms and principles behind it-- and concentrates on knowing how/where to shoot it. Even when the gun breaks, that person can fix it and just keep shootin folks. That's what I'm advocating. Let's all know how to make guns, but know how to shoot them better than that, so we can get the maximum killing... Potential... You know what I'm trying to say.

(Daaaaaamn, that analogy got grim).