the art of editing your own writing

I never really learned how to do this. most of my undergrad (and grad) days were spent scrambling to finish the first and only draft of class papers by the deadline, press print then submit without looking. It was a tight-rope routine that I somehow mastered and grew accustomed to. Well, needless to say the magic has worn off. The quick-fix tricks don't work now that I'm preparing myself for the big leagues. And here I thought that coughing up the first draft was the hardest part!

One of the most difficult things is taking criticisms. So far they have been very constructive and helpful. It's hard when your advisor asks where you voice went and that reading my writing felt like trudging through mud (or something to this extent). The (not so) funny part is that her experience reading my writing was exactly my experience writing the thing. So lesson one: If I have an unusually hard time getting something down on paper, chances are the reader will have an unusually hard time getting through the paper.

This doesn't mean that I've totally regressed in this process. I seem to have done a lot of conceptual work, thinking through complex ideas and grasping them with relative success. The problems that I face now are that 1) with my existing writing skills, I can't express the complexities of my new thinking to do them justice and 2) in order to express these thoughts, I'm trying to imitate the writers that I draw from but butchering their masterful convoluted writing styles in my mimicry.

So I have to find my voice again so that my writing sounds like me, not a cheap version of someone else. At the same time, I need to improve on my technique, rooting out bad habits from the past and find new ways to express what I'm thinking into words. Or, more accurately, structure my writing to accurately organize the structure of my thoughts. The work I need to do are stylistic, structural, syntactic and grammatical. Woah...

But first, baby steps. Facing my first fear: Reading my own writing and breaking it apart.