How do you edit?

[ellajam]

It's true that most published writers have editors. But I hope it's not true that most writers have revisionists; not for their own writing. A writer has to be forceful. There needs to be a personality behind a poem, even if it's nowhere to be found in the subject matter. You put your stuff out in the world, and it's liked or disliked or ignored or whatever.
If you work on a poem, you write it, you make it. It's published, and others can do what they want with it. It doesn't seem helpful at all for a writer to be told not to be cocky or egotistical. A person that's cocky and egotistical that can't write is just a person that can't write. A bad writer is a bad writer whether they take advice or suggestions or not. They can improve, taking advice can help them improve. Maybe. But writing isn't done on an assembly line. Maybe it is in some places, in workshops with ties or hopeful ties to publications that have a "house style" or whatever they call it. But it just seems that a poem can be workshopped to death. There is a difference between editing and revising. Editors and other writers can help edit a poem or a story or a book, but writers write. I mean people already think of writers as lazy enough, sitting around all day making stuff up like a daydreamer. Writers write their stuff, they revise their stuff. That's what writing is. If they can't do that then they can't write.
Nobody ever wants to publish anything I write, so I'm not saying whether I think I can write or not. But obviously I think I can do something or I wouldn't be doing it.
There's nothing wrong with getting suggestions and revising your writing, but at some point a writer has to be able to believe that they can do it on their own. Criticism is a wonderful thing to have. But being bogged down with some notion of having to be a humble, vapid team player isn't going to accomplish very many wonders for poetry.

"Workshopped to death," have you been reading my threads again.

I've noticed that, just as one would think, the more experienced posters here are much less likely to fall into that trap. Editing is a learned skill, and beginners like me are bound to muck it up sometimes. I wouldn't advise anyone to delete their original, but the only way to learn is to do. I do my best to seriously consider all critique, I make changes that sometimes hurt the poem and sometimes help it. It's not the fault of the critics when the poem gets worse, it's my own inability to know what's best for the poem. For me it's a learning process that I hope will lead to me being able to hear my own work better and start out with better writing on my own.

The humble are not necessarily vapid, and a team is only successful when the players challenge each other to set the bar higher.