When to Edit

“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When I started writing this novel, I did not edit my first five chapters at all. I just wrote and didn’t let the red lines stop me. I just ignored every mistake and plowed ahead.

Prior to the word processor, writers, had to be more of a basher because of the technology available to them. With the typewriter or a pen, you just couldn’t just swoop. I remember typing research papers on a mechanical Smith Corona Corsair. Afterwards, I moved-up to an IBM Selectric II typewriter with the correction ribbon. With this technology I wrote papers out by hand and had everything laid out in detail before typing the paper. While I lived in France, I wrote graduate school papers using a typewriter because back then I didn’t have access to a computer with an English language operating system. It was one thing to speak French and another to learn DOS commands in French and trouble shoot the PC in French. I could barely figure out the PC in English.

After returning to the United States, I bought my first personal Apple Macintosh SE. The Macintosh changed the way I wrote immediately. I became a swooper. I didn’t have to be as careful about what I typed. I now use Microsoft word in-conjunction with Scrivener on a laptop which makes swooping easiers. 

Now can I swoop for a long time and when I start to run out of steam, I go back and do some bashing.