A Slow and Careful Consideration

There's so much you can get dinged for in English, and with every pass I take over something I find more. It's a sifting process, and the collision between 'knowing the rules' and 'total creativity' is the place where grammatical accidents happen.

We want to have total freedom and create without limitation.

We need to follow the rules.

I feel I do a pretty good job but I have my hang-ups, like stringing together disparate ideas with commas, and my successful struggle getting over verb-tense issues. I go over my older work and I wonder what I was thinking, but I can see the desperate struggle to get the words out while not being attentive of the rules. As with any art, you get a lot better as you go on - if you keep going on.

We get better, all of us do, as long as we devote a little time each week to learning and re-learning the basics. This is something I even do, I pick up older English books every week, flip to a random page, and just read. They can be basic or advanced theory, but it is a part of my training regimen every week to keep brushing up. I liken it to exercise and calisthenics, running practice sprints, weight-lifting and the other training athletes perform.

This helps, it really does. I have a library of basic grammar to advanced fiction theory in real books and sitting on my shelf reminding me I am using shelf space to store these so they expect to be used. I leave them lying around, on my breakfast table, by my bed, in stacks near my computer - everywhere. My little writing books are a part of my life, and that's where I want them to be.

I'm not perfect though, and sometimes silly stuff slips through. I try to do penance for my sins, picking something I messed up on and writing a workshop on the subject. This has helped as well over the years. Also, please, never be afraid of 'doing the work' - knowing you have an issue and going back through everything line by line looking for that one issue. That blood lost now is called the learning process, and the repetition of fixing the error over and over again toughens you up and teaches you the rule like nothing else.

So I adopted a process of a 'slow and careful consideration' when I do my editing passes. I know I have to do several on a project, because an editing pass is also another opportunity to learn and apply knowledge, and the more you do the better it gets.

It stays with you though, so never think editing time is wasted. Every hour spent editing makes the next book all the much better. You will likely spend the same time editing the next book finding new issues, so don't expect editing to get better as it goes along. You are learning, conquering old things, and tackling new things with each book and with each pass.

It gets better as you go, but you do feel better as you keep up your training regimen, and use every book as a new opportunity to learn.