Editing

"A friend of mine once said this famously. And I think it's very true. To write a book, in the process of writing, you have to become the person you need to become to finish that book. And so when you write a book, you yourself have to be transformed in the process of writing it. And that can take a while, man. Especially if you're serious about the transformation. That could take a while."
- Junot Diaz, Interview with Bill Moyers, 12/8/12

I've got novel editing on the brain. Who else? I think it's time to print out the full copy and get out my red pen. Part of my ambition for 2013 is to create a full second draft of my NaNo novel, and taking advice from Grant Faulkner of OLL about taking a first pass to look at the macro, the plot points and counterpoints and progression, and waiting for the second pass to look at the micro, the sentence-level stuff.

(My other writing ambition for the year is to begin a regular practice of translation, working from Prato's Giu la piazza non c'e nessuno, which I started translating years ago, but that will have to wait until I can dig my copy out of the closet. It's the same plastic-bound photocopied version that I made in 2000 when working on my thesis, because I was too poor to buy a copy and could only borrow it for short periods of time. Ahhh the days before copyright was a big deal in higher ed...)