It's Self-Self-Editing Week

I promised we’d talk about worldbuilding this week, but another theme keeps popping up in the workshop: How to self-edit. This week, we’re going to look at how to process your own work, and part of that has to do with when. The moment you open your work up to other people’s criticism, their feedback weaves its way into your revision. Workshops may give you easy solutions for turning an unedited text into a publishable one. If you’re looking for the fastest route to repair, this is it.

But workshop critiques cannot help you to create the piece you had intended to create. Your goals and intensions for your writing remain private. Only you have access to them, so only you can craft the piece that achieves your highest and most accurate goals. This is the most time consuming approach, but it’s also the preferable one. Donald Hall rightly suggests that we never hand over a piece to workshop until we’ve spent enough time editing it on our own. Anything less will crush your delicate work.

Still, I spent the first years of my writing life presenting new pieces to a workshop. I know many of you present new pieces here. There’s a reason I don’t hold you back too hard: The best way to learn to self-edit is by listening to critiques of your work. Don’t settle into it too easily or for too long. Once you’ve picked up some skills, start widening the gap between writing and requesting critiques. Use the skills the moment you have them.

This week, I’ll give you a few pointers on expediting this process, so if you have some work waiting for critiques, please hold onto them so we can work on self-editing together. If you want to make this process public, you’re welcome to post your work in this thread. This will not be for feedback—only to demonstrate how well your own editing is going later in the week.