Editing Quotas

Although I have a new story in progress, I'm actually spending most of my writing time editing Summon the Seasons and the Young Seasons short story collection. It's hard to gauge progress when you're editing. While you can aim for a consistent number of new words when you're drafting something new, editing isn't as straightforward. I'm not only replacing text, but I'm also removing some scenes entirely. (The current word count for Summon the Seasons is about 91,000 words, down from about 95,000 for the first draft.) Some scenes also require more extensive editing than others. While I'm spending a lot of time revising the opening of the book, I don't anticipate changing the ending so much. Maybe this is why the do-it-yourself MFA I discussed last week doesn't mention editing what you write.

Instead of trying to set a daily page or word count for editing, I'm going to set goal dates for myself. I'd like to finish editing Young Seasons by the end of March and Summon the Seasons by the end of June. It's up to me to determine how to spend my writing time to meet those goals, especially since I also have to factor in the first draft of the new story and all of my other non-writing tasks and goals. We'll see if I can make those goals.

Do you set editing goals for your own stories? If so, what criteria do you use? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.