A tip on writing/editing. In other words, my writing process in a nutshell. · 7:06am Apr 7th, 2018
Personally, while my preference is typically to self-edit with occasional help from prereaders, it is still important to have a good method of writing.
One way that I've taken quite a liking to is what I'd call the "two-stage writing session", where throughout the day and/or whenever you have time, you just write. And write. And write. I only pay basic attention to plot continuity to avoid later annoyances such as plotholes, but otherwise just dump my ideas down as soon as I can. Then, later on once everybody else has gone to sleep, I go back and self-edit the chapter or story in complete silence, or occasionally with some music playing over my headphones. It helps greatly with concentration, since the dark of the night and the lack of outside noise practically eliminates any form of distraction. During the self-editing session, I comb through the writing line-by-line, watching out for grammatical errors or just plain awkward wording. Occasionally, I may also add additional sections to the story, or substitute a certain portion for another.
Basically, this first method that I use can be simplified into two stages: Write in the day, edit in the night.
The second method of writing that I typically use for one-shots and the occasional trollfic is to just wing it. To sum it up, I pretty much do the exact same thing as the first method, but instead ignore everything outside of grammatical errors, and skip the self-editing. I would recommend that this method of writing should only be used for either comedic stories, or for experimental stories where the flow of the story matters less than how the plot actually takes place.
This second method is exactly what it sounds like: Just wing it, as long as you know what you're doing.
The third and final method that I have is also the method of writing that I used to use up until around the last couple months of 2017. Similarly to the second method, I write everything in one go, but rather than splitting the workload into two stages to lighten up the burden, I not only write, but also self-edit chapters within a given time frame. This works much better with short, <500 word chapters, but often breaks down when you pass around 800 words depending on time constraints. The main reason why I stopped using this method of writing was because it often led to me burning myself out, or trying to put so much into a chapter in a limited amount of time that I either end up forgetting entirely about what I wanted to write, or winding up with having to overutilize filler material in order to artificially bump up the word count of stories after boiling down much of the original plot into a couple paragraphs.
To sum it up, while I'd advise that this method isn't to be used for longer stories and/or chapters, the basic idea is to not only write, but also (self)edit everything in one go.
Maybe sometime in the future I might post a blog about my writing styles over the years. ^_^
