Perceiving and Judging

It's Wednesday! It means I have a new email from the Publication Coach. Most of you who read my posts know that I have subscribed to professional editor and coach Daphne Grey-Grant's blog. The following is taken from her latest post.

Grant views writing and editing as separate tasks, perceiving and judging. When we write, we perceive or sense the words to use and when we edit, we choose the words based on judgment.

"And this takes me back to my basic belief: That it’s better for writers to write (perceive) as quickly as possible and then edit (judge) as slowly as they can bear."

Since Keeper loves to multi-task, she often writes and edits, at the same time. Her readers just know how efficient she is when it comes to updating her fics. OTL.

Writing while editing leads to a type of writer's block which I will call, The Perfectionist Block, after John C. Maxwell's The Perfection Gap.

5. The Perfection Gap - "I have to find the best way before I start."

We can never really say what works best when we don't try it first. I am like this when I was a student. I want my first answer in my assignments to be the right or best answer. Of course, I do research, so finding out the best way before starting works for me.

But not with my pastor years ago. He, on the other hand, wants the first sentence of his composition to be perfect; that he ends up editing and editing that first sentence, until eventually, he deletes the whole sentence.

I kinda laughed at that. Although I also like the first sentence in every story or chapter to be an eye catcher, I also know to just write and edit later. Then edit some more. Thanks to editing coach Daphne Gray-Grant. Editing while writing breeds frustration. This is one of the reasons why we can't seem to finish or nail down a chapter or story.

You can read the other Growth Gap Traps here.

Notice that if you just write and not concern yourself with spelling, grammar and other things, you actually come up with a draft of your update.

Try writing the words as they come to you. Don't think if it sounds good or makes sense, just write.

I turn off the spell and grammar checks. I don't know if it is just me, but it is annoying to see the red curly line and the green line when I write. I like my writing space neat and I have this urge to make it neat.

So, I edit.

...

Then I forget what I was supposed to write next. How annoying! For the sake of my mental health, I just turn them on after at least one round of editing.

Another suggestion I learned from Grant and altered a bit, is to leave notes where you want them to be. Keeper tends to focus on the missing details that she loses focus on her writing.

Even if I have done my research, the act of leaving my current doc file to view another...is distracting. I tried copy pasting the facts I need in my writing space but shifting my gaze away from the line I am writing on to read the facts I gathered leads to the same result.

So I just fill the blanks or unknowns after, like the names. Or better yet, I study my researched notes first before the actual writing.

Once I have my first draft, it would just be a matter of reading and editing and editing.

When you edit, don't fall into The Comparison Gap trap.

7. The Comparison Gap - "Others are better than I am."

Hohoho. AFFers are guilty of this. Including Keeper. We are discouraged when we read others' stories which are way better than ours. We feel like we can never be like them, let alone surpass them, so why even bother trying?

Wrong. Hey, we are created unique :) We do things differently. Our styles and voices are different. Why bother comparing things that are different in the first place?

Off topic: It is okay to copy or imitate the style of other writers if you have none at the moment. Because in the process of learning another person's style, you somehow find your own ^-^ (Daphne Grey Grant shared something like this in one of her blogs. My other pastor also said the same thing, but his style has something to do with fashion.)