The name of this site is Self Helping Yourself, but today I want to talk about Self-Editing Yourself.
Some Examples of Self-Editing Yourself
To clarify what I mean by self-editing yourself, let me give you a few examples from my own life.
I previously mentioned that a couple weeks ago I spent two days writing a blog post, only to abandon it before publishing because I realized it was kind of obnoxious.
This recently happened again. I started writing a post, and the further I got into it, the more I sensed it was going off the rails.
I took a break to do some random chores, and then kept doing additional random chores to avoid returning to the post. Normally once I start a post, I’m excited to finish. But this seemed like a burden. Eventually I realized it was my subconscious telling me the post was all wrong and I should throw it away.
What is Self-Editing Yourself
There are two aspects to self-editing. The easier part is looking at a draft of something you created, and trying to improve it by fixing flaws and finding small refinements. In writing, this would be things like improving phrasing, elaborating on unclear points, cutting repetitive stuff, tweaking word choices, and fixing typos.
The harder part of self-editing yourself is recognizing when you’re making a more significant mistake. This involves setting aside your ego and understanding that not everything you produce is going to be pure gold. Some of it will be crap. You have to be able to view your work with an objective eye, different from the mindset you were in when you created it. And then be willing to throw away all the work you’ve already put in.
Hardest of all is grasping that quality is dependent on context. Some work may seem great by itself, but if it’s wrong for where it’s designed to be used, it still needs to be abandoned.
Self-Editing Yourself is For All Creative Endeavors
Self-Editing isn’t only important for writing. It’s a useful skill any time you’re being creative.
I take a very expansive view of creativity. It isn’t just for writers and artists. Anyone using their own ideas is being creative. That includes coming up with a corporate strategy, making a sales pitch, calming an irate customer, writing code, or designing a spreadsheet. These are all cases where self-editing yourself can make you more effective and avoid mistakes.
One of the most impressive acts of self-editing I’ve ever witnessed was in an area that most people think of as not creative at all. A company I worked at brought in a new Chief Financial Officer who was – well, there’s no polite way to put this – a complete jerk. He was constantly screaming and insulting people. After six weeks, the CEO fired him, simply for being a tool, and apologized to the company for making the mistake of hiring that guy in the first place.
Hiring a CFO is a huge deal for a company, involving the Board of Directors and months of planning. Firing one after six weeks is an even bigger deal. For the CEO to be willing to self-edit in such a huge way, abandoning a plan that he realized was a mistake, even though doing so involved a lot of effort, cost, and personal embarrassment, speaks a lot to his character.
Beyond work, everyone is creative whenever we have a conversation or write a post on Facebook. If you’ve ever gotten yourself into trouble with an ill-thought-out remark, you could have benefited from some self-editing.
Of course self-editing in a real-time conversation is different from self-editing when you’re able to reflect and review your work. It may be as simple as pausing for a moment before you speak to ask yourself, “Is it a good idea to say this?” But it is definitely a worthwhile habit to build.
How to Know When You Need Self-Editing
How do you know when you need to self-edit yourself? That’s kind of a trick question, because you could always benefit from a bit of self-editing. Nothing is going to be perfect on your first attempt.
The more pragmatic concern is balancing improving your creations against deadlines and costs of finishing them later, how long editing will take, how much you’ll be able to improve it, what you could be spending that time doing, how much quality matters, and a gajillion other factors. You don’t want to spend hours crafting the perfect response to a text asking when you’ll be home for dinner, and you don’t want to bang out your doctoral dissertation in 10 minutes will sitting on the toilet.
The harder question is how to know when to self-edit yourself by improving your work, versus abandoning your work, or a significant chunk of it. One of my film school professors had a saying: “All scripts need to be rewritten. Not all scripts deserve to be rewritten.”
Sometimes you want to put in the additional effort to make something the best it can be. Sometimes you want to say, “Eh, good enough,” and call it done. And sometimes you want to say, “This is garbage,” throw your previous efforts in the trash, and never speak of it again. How do you know which is the right course of action?
Look Forward, Not Backward
Something that helps is to thoroughly understand and internalize the sunk cost fallacy. The past is the past and can’t be changed. Any time, effort, money, and mental energy you’ve already expended is gone, no matter what you do in the future.
Choose your best course of action now, looking forward, based on the world as it is today, and as you anticipate for the future, without regard to past expenditures of effort or money. Many people persist with poor choices because they don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their previous efforts and money. But you are not honoring your prior investments by making bad decisions today.
Learn From Your Mistakes, and Learn the Warning Signs
Nobody’s perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. One of the most effective ways to learn when you should self-edit yourself is when you don’t do it, and then things go horribly wrong. File that away in the back of your head, and then watch for patterns and warning signs that you are making the same mistake.
I’m a recovered internet-argument addict. And I know that I can sometimes tip toward being one of those recovered addicts that is a bit overzealous in crusading against the focus of my addiction.
I also feel that one shouldn’t hate people for having different beliefs. That’s a notion that is generally accepted and considered the mark of a good person when we’re talking about religious beliefs, but is much more controversial when it’s referring to political beliefs.
I know that anytime I’m writing about these subjects, I need to give myself extra scrutiny when self-editing. Especially when these subjects intersect. I have a tendency to relapse into my former internet-argument addict behaviors when arguing that people shouldn’t engage in internet arguments, and exhibit contempt toward people who believe in having contempt for people with different beliefs.
The recent posts I abandoned were about this topic. And they ended up being condescending, hypocritical, insulting, and would have pushed people to believe the opposite of what I was advocating. Which is why I decided to self-edit and not post them.
These are my personal bugaboos/demons/issues. For you, it will be something different, unique to you and your own field of creative endeavors. It’s extremely valuable to learn when you need to give yourself extra scrutiny so you can avoid making huge mistakes.
Learn From The Mistakes of Others
“You must learn from the mistakes of others. You will never live long enough to make them all yourself“
There’s a saying, “You must learn from the mistakes of others. You will never live long enough to make them all yourself.*”
I’m not a fan of schadenfreude. When someone makes a mistake, it’s far better to offer them sympathy and empathy rather than scorn. Additionally, I think there are two appropriate responses when someone else’s failure to self-edit blows up in their faces.
- Try to keep yourself clear of any ensuing drama.
- Try to understand what happened so that you can avoid doing the same thing in the future.
Note that #1 is a higher priority than #2. Don’t let your desire to learn lead you to snoop, be a gossip, or stick your nose into other people’s business. In other words, you should self-edit any efforts to acquire information, and learn based on the facts that you already know.
Think of Your Self-Edited Work as Being Stored, Not Destroyed
There’s a psychological trick I use to make it easier to throw away previous work when I’m self-editing. Instead of deleting something, I’ll save it somewhere that it will never be used. In practice this doesn’t make a difference, since my work won’t see the light of day either way. But feeling like I’m just moving my work and it isn’t really gone helps remove any hesitation when I know that eliminating it is the right thing to do.
When I’m working on a script or book, I’ll have a file called “[Title] – Cut Scenes.” If I write an angry rant of a Facebook post or comment, I’ll e-mail it to myself when I realize it’s a bad idea. My unpublished blog posts are still sitting in WordPress’s “Saved Drafts,” where they’ll be forever. So my work still exists somewhere, even if nobody, including me, will ever look at it.
This is what I do as a writer. Whatever your creative field is, you may be able to think of something similar, where you make it easier to abandon your work by archiving it somewhere so you know it still exists.
And if you’re self-editing it for reasons of context, it may even be something you reuse later for something else.
When You Shouldn’t Be Self-Editing Yourself
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to weave. Because we’re not good at it yet.”
There are also times when self-editing yourself is not appropriate.
For example, if you’re a beginner who is just learning. A friend of mine likes to say, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to weave. Because we’re not good at it yet.”
When you’re starting out at something, it’s expected that you’ll be bad. If you’re the kind of person that wants to be good at anything you do, don’t let your failure to immediately be an expert let you self-edit yourself out of taking the time to learn something you might enjoy.
If you’ve been playing the guitar for two weeks, maybe don’t try out for America’s Got Talent, but go ahead and post that video of you playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to Facebook. Some of your friends will congratulate you on your progress, and those who don’t want to hear your fumbling attempts to play a kiddie song will skip past the video.
It can also be helpful to knowingly put out bad work for the purpose of learning form it. As in saying, “I know this doesn’t work. Can you please teach me what I’m doing wrong?”
Another time to back off from the self-editing is when you’re experiencing anxiety or making excuses to avoid putting any of your work out there. Some of my Rules to Live By are “Doing something 30% is better than not doing it all,” “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and “It is often better to call something good enough and complete it, rather than spend and unreasonable amount of time trying to improve it and never finishing it.”
Self-Editing to the point of trashing something entirely should be a relatively rare occurrence. It should be reserved for things that will cause anger, hurt feelings, drama, material problems, or harm to your reputation, or are far below the normal quality of your work.
If you’re self-editing away all or even most of your work, there’s something wrong. It’s not possible for all your work to be below your average quality. Most likely, the work is just fine, and the problem is with your confidence.
(On the other hand, if all your work is likely to cause drama and hurt feelings, you might want to switch to a different creative outlet, while trying to foster a more benevolent attitude.)
Conclusion: Self-Editing Yourself is About Producing Your Best Work
It would be nice if we all had personal editors, or an impartial panel to give us helpful feedback before we showed our work to anyone. (Not really. That would drive us completely bonkers.)
In the absence of that, we need to develop the skill of recognizing when what we’ve produced isn’t up to our own standards. And especially, when it will cause problems. At which point our options are to accept it as is, fix it, or abandon it.
Any of these choices may be right, but we should be mindful and aware of when we are making the choice in the first place.
What about you? How often do you self-edit? Do you have any strategies for self-editing in general, or specific to your creative field? Do you have any warning signs that you should give yourself extra scrutiny?
* I’ve seen this quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Groucho Marx, Eleanor Roosevelt, Warren Buffet, and some less famous people. The true origin is unknown.
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