Life lessons from my Summer of Editing

Article | August 22, 2024

Three months ago, the draft of my upcoming book Vaguely Human Figures was an absolute mess. 

Half the chapters were unfinished and littered with brackets (placeholders for further revisions such as [add stuff here] and [make something big happen here]), while others were incomprehensible jumbles of words that made sense only to me. The timeline was confusing, the locations were inconsistent, and massive plot holes swallowed up an already faulty storyline.

The biggest issue with being a messy drafter is that the subsequent editing stage is horrific. I drafted VHF in about three months, but I’ve been editing it for about eight, and there’s still work to be done. While the drafting stage is exciting and full of passion, editing feels uninspired in comparison. It feels like cleaning up the morning after a party, doing damage control after having too much fun. 

My only goal for the summer was to have a final draft of VHF. No matter what happened, I wanted it to be done so that I could move onto the next stages of the publishing process. A natural disaster could strike, or I could end up in the hospital, but I would continue regardless, because I wanted to be done with the horrific editing stage. 

Now, I have about a month before I return to school, and I’m on track to have my final draft (or something very close to a final draft) by then. Somehow, I’ve managed to turn my outrageously long summer break into the Summer of Editing, and I’ve made VHF readable (wow!!). I’ve refined most of the plot and tightened the prose. Though I still have some plot holes and character arcs I’m patching up, it’s a hell of a lot better than it was three months ago, and I’m infinitely proud of how far it’s come. 

More than that, I’m proud of what I’ve learned from my Summer of Editing, and I thought I’d use my blog to share some of the major life lessons that have come out of it.  

One reason editing is hard is because I psych myself out about it. I think about all the changes I have to make, and I get overwhelmed. There are too many things to do. When am I going to do all of that? What if I make it worse? 

When I first started editing VHF, I made myself an unrealistic schedule. I wanted to revise 100 pages a day so I could do my first round of rewriting in under a week. I bit off far more than I could chew, which only left me overwhelmed and unproductive. When I switched to editing 2 chapters (or about 30 pages) per day instead, I made significantly more progress, and more importantly, I developed a routine. Every morning, I edited those 30 pages without fail, and as I continued to do so, it started to feel natural. Enjoyable. I’ve learned that sometimes, bigger isn’t better. Trying to handle too much at once is often counterproductive. 

The Summer of Editing has taught me to break things down and to give myself time, and that a large portion of accomplishing difficult tasks comes from my mindset. If I give myself too much work, I'll freak out and panic and keep pushing it back. Smaller, digestible steps are the way to go when working on something as complex as editing a novel.

Another thing I learned is that difficult tasks inspire great joy. People love to be challenged. That’s why we feel satisfied when we solve an advanced math problem or beat a difficult level in a video game. Challenge provides a degree of purpose to our lives, and dedicating ourselves to something beyond day-to-day tasks boosts our moods. (In July I read the book Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, which emphasized the fact that happiness comes from the balance between everyday pleasures and long-term dedication. A rat racer who focuses solely on the future is bound to be unhappy, and so is the hedonist that only focuses on the present and fails to account for long-term value. A healthy amount of challenge gives us purpose, which in turn makes us happy.)

Although I struggled a lot this summer and had moments where I dreaded editing and hated my book, I’m ultimately glad I went though all of that because it built my mental fortitude. The breakdowns I’ve had throughout the summer were a small price to pay for the progress I made, and I see myself carrying these lessons into my future as I work on other difficult tasks.

Overall, I'd say this was a fairly successful summer. I'm going to keep working on VHF and hopefully have it out by early 2025. As tired as I am of it, I want all of this to mean something. This is only the beginning.