I find that I'm constantly rewriting or rewording earlier passages, often for a whole host of different reasons:
- Seeding something for later on that I didn't think of at the time when I first wrote it.
- Reinforcing ideas that should be going on throughout that I forgot about or overlooked while being busy writing what the main focus of that chapter was
- Plain old fixing broken sentences and crappy grammar
- An easy excuse to not do the hard stuff and write the new parts.
... and specific to this story, or at least, the way I've chosen to write it:
- fixing POV issues where 90% of the chapter is correctly told from one point of view, but suddenly there's a bunch of paragraphs in the middle where they magically know what the other character is thinking...
As such, my chapter one has been picked over about 20 times and reads very nicely now (as does the prologue of my earlier piece that's on hold that prompted me to write this story in the first case!) whereas the recently completed chapter 13 hasn't even be re-read once yet, let alone edited, and chapter 7 (which I finished the first big edit of last night) had DOZENS of minor corrections and errors and missing words that needed fixing and quite a lot of tidying up, inserting of important stuff for later, reinforcement of themes running throughout, and general 'improving'.
As such, to me... editing and revision feels more like the constant maintenance needed for a nice garden. Once it's all in place and working, you just need to keep an eye on it and keep stuff trimmed and healthy. But it's a lot of work to get it to that stage!
(which is annoyingly ironic... since I live in a flat, with no garden...
)
