: How do I gain sufficient emotional distance from my work to edit it? This question was asked by a member of my critique group at the beginning of the month and I've been stewing over it

Vote Up Vote Down

There are various ways to do this, and they're all to some extent personal. They're personal because they have to be.

They have to be because the essential goal here is to be someone else, a different you to the one that wrote the writing in the first place. To do this, you have to know how to deal with the first-draft-writer version of yourself, you have to know what other versions of yourself exist, and how to bring them out.

This is why I think there can never be a universally applicable answer to this question. It all depends on who you're dealing with when you're dealing with you.

So my advice is to experiment. Find the ritual that works for you. Like any ritual, it doesn't have to matter so much what you do. You just have to - one way or another - cause a change in yourself, to find a way to summon the versions of yourself that can't - or simply refuse - to appear on command.

Here are a few examples of the sort of things that you could try:

Doing all of your writing in one place, and your editing in another.
Playing music while you write, but not while you edit (or vice versa).
Writing in the morning, editing in the evening (or vice versa).
Printing off your work so that you can't edit it, annotating the printout, then making edits based on your annotations.
Writing by hand, then editing on a computer (it's probably irrelevant, since we're talking about you here, but for what it's worth, this is the one that works best for me).
Finding an activity (going to parties, playing a sport, watching films, meditating) which alters your mood in a significant way, and editing immediately afterwards.
Pretending you're someone else while you edit. Perhaps someone who has enjoyed previous writing by you and is about to read your new stuff with a critical (but not entirely unsympathetic) eye.
Leaving a set amount of time before editing (as others have suggested). Of course, this could easily be combined with one or more of the others.
Writing in one font, editing in another.
(Etc.)

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Beyond time and cleansing your brain-palate, which others have noted here, I found that being a little "off" helps me, oddly enough. A little sleepy (like foregoing my morning coffee), a little hyper (several extra cups of coffee), working in somebody else's house, working on somebody else's machine. Change something about your usual environment.

What you essentially want is not to be re-writing the story in your head as you go along reading it. You want to read it with an editor's or outsider's eye. Time and distraction accomplish a lot of this, but so can altering your mental state slightly. Obviously you don't want to be impaired, because that prevents you from accomplishing anything, but "a jump to the left" is what you're aiming for.

(0)