Note: what follows is a limited-time, semi-rough draft of a chapter of my upcoming book, Editing! | Refine Your Editorial Workflow. Enjoy!
I hesitate to tell you within the context of this editorial guide that editing is unimportant… but there is some truth to it.
In fact, I didn’t even edit this book! (I’m joking, of course.)
In all seriousness, though, editing isn’t everything. A prerequisite to editing is to write or create, and sometimes, that alone is enough.
Imagine you have a young daughter who brings you a schooltime doodle. To love, appreciate, and display it on the kitchen fridge, do you need to critique the piece? Should your daughter have to put it through a revisional workflow to tweak the composition, solidify the lines, or try again not with crayons but markers or paint to enhance its saturation?
Or imagine that a loved one struggling with an addiction came to you for advice. Should you, before uttering a word, fully formulate, transpose, filter, and alter your thoughts such that when you speak, they’ll have maximal effect? After all, you’re trying to help them the best you can… but I bet you’ll prove a more effective, loving communicator if instead, you simply speak candidly, and compassionately, from the earnest depths of your heart.
Editing is unimportant sometimes, in cases like these, and that’s because editing can, at times, come between us and the content and|or our fellow people.
Editing one of your written works thoroughly may be one of the most rewarding actions you may ever undertake. And yet, many writers prove successful despite not editing (or at least, despite not editing in the traditionally understood sense). If other writers can achieve great success with little to no editing—though it is admittedly rare—then you can, too.
There’s no law of physics that necessitates editing, just as there is no scriptural commandment that says: “Thou must edit until at least the triplicate draft, or thou will forever burn in the inferno below!”
However, if you want to edit minimally without just “pushin’ shit,” you still need to work hard.
Writers who’ve succeeded with little to no editing were able to do so because, in most cases, they had years or decades of previous experience often reading, writing, receiving feedback, and, usually, editing. These literary activities differentiate our neural circuitry, develop into habits, and provide us an invisible wealth of knowledge that resides within our subconscious. The writers who’ve succeeded despite editing little or not at all were not able to do so because they were geniuses; they succeeded as a result of all their past practice and repetition of writing and editing.
They day-by-day developed a critical intuition—much like a sixth sense—that they could use in parallel simultaneity with their creative side.
A novice writer without that well-developed intuition may try to edit while they create, and likely, they’ll feel like they're trying to drive a car with one foot planted on the gas and the other stomping on the brakes. Lurching along awkwardly, uncomfortably, ineffectively. The novice writer would do much better to simply drive ahead, with steady progress, with a foot off the brakes unless a severe crash is imminent. Afterward, they can reflect on their mistakes and coolly return to where they started and retrace their route, cleaning up any messes they made along their first pass.
A more experienced writer, however, may be more like an F1 driver, with an F1 car that has an incredibly powerful acceleratory engine and braking system. The experienced writer may choose to fly along, switching rapidly between driving fast and breaking hard, seamlessly, with expert, nearly-automatic precision, to race to the finish line as efficiently and safely as possible. Of course, they could return to the start and clean up their messes too, but they may also have little to no messes to clean up because of their exceptional experience. They might be better off simply moving on to a new track, with new difficulties, than taking extra time to more deeply study or fix the relatively few mistakes that they just made.
There are endless examples of experienced writers doing so.
For example, Agatha Christie (“The Queen of Crime,” author of And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express) wrote Absent in the Spring in only three days, under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and she said she made only “tiny” changes to the original draft.
Isaac Asimov (“The Father of Robotics,” author of Foundation and I, Robot) is one of the most acclaimed and prolific writers in human history, and he claimed that his first drafts were essentially the same as his final copies, with only an estimated 5% of his text being changed. Any of his erratic keystrokes or spelling errors were left to copy editors.
Robert Heinlein (“The Dean of Science Fiction Writers,” author of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers), a contemporary of Asimov, felt similar, as he advocated for “Business Rule 3” in his essay “On Writing Speculative Fiction.” “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.” He believed that editing could easily “kill the soul,” and he often submitted his first drafts unedited.
Eric Stanley Gardner (“The Fiction Factory,” author of the Perry Mason series) often dictated his novels to a team of secretaries because it was faster than typing, and he’d often complete the “writing” of a full novel in only a few days, immediately moving on to the next.
Mickey Spillane (“The King of Pulp Fiction”) considered his work a commodity that hardly required revision, so he barely edited beyond basic corrections. He finished his widely considered best work, I, the Jury, in only 9 days.
Please, allow me a couple more examples to drive this point home: you can eventually succeed with minimal editing.
Walter B. Gibson, (“The Wizard of Words,” author of 300+ Shadow novels) wrote about 1,660,000 words per year, or about 4,400 per day, typing so fast and consistently that he had to bandage his bleeding fingers to keep going. He often didn’t edit at all, moving from the end of one novel to the beginning of the next, though he sometimes took a few days off for his hands to recover.
Frederick Faust (“The King of the Pulps,” known primarily for his Western stories under his pseudonym, Max Brand) wrote over 30,000,000 words in his career, typing up to 10,000 words per day—hey, that’s also my personal record!—and almost never editing his prose, though he meticulously edited his poetry.
And last but certainly not least, Harlan Ellison (the leader of “New Wave” speculative fiction, and the winner of 8 Hugo Awards, 4 Nebula Awards, 5 Bram Stoker Awards, 2 Edgar Awards, and 2 World Fantasy Awards, among others) sometimes performed his writing in the windows of bookstores, taking a prompt from the audience (once a prompt from Robin Williams) and typing a complete short story with his type writer in one sitting. Then he’d take the pages to the window as he finished them, and some went on to win major awards without a single edit. He thought that if a writer was sufficiently skilled and “in the zone,” the first draft should be the final draft, and he famously wrote his masterpiece, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” in a single night and published it with almost no changes.
There are countless more instances of individual works that had massive literary and cultural impact despite having little to no editing, from Anne Frank’s Diary and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Emily Dickinson’s posthumously published poetry.
What matters most is not editing but the prerequisite act of creating something from nothing—the act of actualizing art, which begins in the abstract, metaphysical realm and ends here, in the physical, tangible world.
Editing is arguably the most fundamental tool that the writer may employ to improve their writing—but it isn’t everything.
Because editing isn’t even always necessary, as I’ve shown. Rather, editing’s utility depends on the writer’s skills, and the goals and|or purpose of their work.
I hope you enjoyed this rough sneak peek at my next book, comin’ soon! Happy reading and writing!
—LeDavid DeLouis
Bottom line, the more you write, the more you improve, and the less editing you need. I think it is more important at the beginning, when, as a beginner, you can't spot your own weaknesses. There are also different levels of editing, from large-scale structural issues to simple proofreading for typos. I've written well over two million words of fiction (not all of it published yet) and was recently able to negotiate a lower price with my editor just because my books need less editing than average. She has never had to make any structural suggestions and agreed to drop the developmental editing altogether, since I don't need it.
(I've also read ~200 Shadow books, and a lot of the other pulp authors you mentioned. There were 300+ Shadow books, but Gibson did not write them all. There were multiple authors working under the Maxwell Grant pen name.)