How do you edit?

[rayheinrich]

The most useful editing device for me is time.
It takes a week or so for me to forget the parts in my head
and see only what's on the paper.
So I edit a little bit every week or month or year depending
on where I've misplaced it.
(In the meantime there are those other poems from the weeks
or months or years before... )


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Addendum:
The above pertains to personal editing. Someone else (audience/
editor) doesn't have to wait a week to forget 90%, they come at
it 100% forgetful. There's a tradeoff. They know what they see,
but don't know what you want. You know what you want (well, sort
of - gets better with experience), but you don't know what they
see. (Exception: If you're feeding at the PigPen learning trough;
the senior folks here not only know what they see, they know what
you want.)

But in between? The 'in between' is an analog of the Heisenberg principle:
The more an editor knows what you want, the less an editor knows
what she/he sees. (Hence explaining many famous-author death-spirals.)

There's an exception to this (actually a definition): Editors of
publications know what they want and absolutely, positively,
without-a-doubt, and any other cliché you care to come up with;
KNOW what they see. The definition part is that you have to
write something that they KNOW what they see. (And since I've
never quite mastered this, you should regard most of the above
with suspicion.)