A full edit is a revision. A great memoir author, with six books traditionally published, taught us about this in a class about revision. “It’s fun,” Marion Winik said. “It’s like getting a fresh vision of your story.” Your edit arrives and unless it’s only a copy edit, there’s now work for you to do.
It’s going to be mighty hard, maybe impossible, to create a book that people will recommend without first revising it. I believe many of us will never live to see attractive and enticing AI revision of fiction. You can’t wipe out art, but unwise advocates of AI can. There’s even a an analysis aspect of one popular editing tool, touting its AI powers. You get a report and you don’t get to ask questions about it.
Nonfiction editing might get good enough, given another decade, but this is about language skill. The level of skill to deliver that revision is grim now. The things to teach AI software about emotion and drama can hardly be taught to humans by humans. Expecting software to learn about emotion feels fruitless.
Shortcuts in conception lead to ersatz work. I’m not a fan of Impossible meat, either. People’s tastes are different, of course — literally.
Revision is a fine point about writing that we all must accept. I received my edits on my novel in summer, and it took weeks to feel better about the book. I could have worked harder and longer and gotten done sooner. But the revision still would have been done in a dozen weeks, instead of two dozen, across the 55 chapters and 117,000 words. There were times when I just had to think, “How do I help readers see Anna is hopeful, or suffering?” Then, craft a sentence that understands everything about her and what she’s been through.
The book is significantly better now. There’s a great movie about editing and writing, Genius. It’s the story of Fitzgerald and his editor. Sam Perkins says, “as editors we hope we’re making books better, not just different.”
This is what is essential to write better, and so hard for a writer to accept. There’s nothing that works better than revision. It takes time that we all have to claim in order for our creations to emerge and to grow. Summer Brennan wrote in a Substack column about success and the effort it demands.
“So often in writing, people want advice on how to succeed, but they don’t like it when that advice includes a lot of time or a lot of work. You can’t expect to get the results of a person who works very hard at something without also working very hard at it yourself.”
There are few naturals, the instinctive self-taught winners, in the game of writing.
