Vincent Torrijos: Editing Narrative

I find the idea of an editing narrative humorous in a, frankly put, childish sort of way. Not to discredit the idea, of course, but editing, unlike literacy, cannot exist in a vacuum. One must have written something down first for it to be edited, and one must be able to understand words, sentence structure, and paragraph organization, all in a written form to be able to actually write. That is to say: to edit, one must be able to read. And, to discuss my reading, I first must confess to a certain quality of myself, rare and debilitating, one that marks me as a shame, a disgrace among my peers, the cardinal sin of an English student: I don't like to read. 

Following this admission, it would probably be best to begin by examining my path to reading and progressing from there. My parents were very thorough in teaching me the basics of reading. I remember my mother reading picture books with me over and over, letter, syllable, word. She’d say it, then we’d say it together, then I alone. I remember waking both my parents up before the break of dawn the first time I read a book by myself, and how my mother, tired as she was, showered me in praise. However, in my mind, it was never about the reading, about the conveying of new information through written word, it was about making my parents proud, and thus, by the time it had stopped being a point of praise, when I was expected to simply know how to read, the desire to read more dried up. 

It was by this point that writing had entered the picture, or, perhaps more so spelling had entered. In first grade, it was all about spelling tests, tests to track our comprehension and memory of how words were spelled. As self-explanatory as they come, a test of your spelling ability, and I did terrible at them. Many C’s, a few B’s or B’s, I’m sure some D’s, and perhaps even an F. 

By Third grade, we had effectively phased out spelling tests, and now, instead, were properly writing. No essays yet, those came around middle school, but paragraphs at the time were the bane of my existence. Four sentences felt like a novel to my young mind, and come time for my first SOL, Standard of Learning tests, I had tired of writing entirely. It was also where the idea of multiple drafts first came into the picture, an idea which, my school still being entirely pen and paper, I despised. “Why do I have to write the same thing twice?” Is how I always thought of it, frustrated at the redundancy. To be honest, the main reason for this clash was due to my writing process at the time, “do it now and never think about it again,” a practice I employ to this day, so having to go back on something that I felt was finished annoyed me to no end. 

There was a brief moment of time in all this, however, that an aspect of writing actually did catch my eye: Poetry. At first, I enjoyed it because it was easy, and often included as an alternative assignment which, in a sea of otherwise longer written work, seemed like an easy out for me. “Just say something in small sentences and make it rhyme.” But either my teachers then were too polite to tell me how terrible my writing was, or I was secretly some kind of prodigy, because I received good grades for my poetry. That is, until I didn’t. The assignment was straightforward, write a poem about the rainforest. For it, I did what I usually did, but had some strange trouble with it. From what I remember, I couldn’t not make the rhyme sound aggressively contrived, something about the word “rainforest” that I couldn’t get past, and it showed. The reception was dishearteningly bad, watching the light fade from my teachers eyes the further I read on, I understood that somehow, I had failed her. That was my first experience with real, critical critique on something creative, and I was devastated. It took years for me to write anything poetic again, not until high school at least. 

Middle school is where the dreaded five paragraph essay was introduced, a format which would spell the proper beginning of my nihilistic worldview on writing. Writing in these years had become nothing more than a medium to convey information, to repeat evidence back to our teachers or exam board through an introduction and thesis, three pieces of supporting evidence, and a conclusion restating the thesis. Even in English and Literature classes, where freewriting assignments were nothing more to me than writing words to fill out the time This is what writing was, and my High School classes did little to change that. 

By this point, I was taking AP, Advanced Placement courses. These were college level classes you can take in high school for college credit should you score high enough on the exam, and each AP exam was timed. The biggest deal with the AP exam was that, outside the science and math exams, every single one had an essay portion, worth approximately half the grade. It was by this point, to my then delight, that drafts were thrown out entirely. Though to be honest, by this point I had already developed personal proofreading skills as to minimize the changes between drafts as much as possible, where I would often not move on from a paragraph or even sentence until it did exactly what I needed it to do. It was a very efficient system, given the conditions. It was even more efficient in the time limits of the exam. I remember being told directly by every AP teacher I had that if I had less than an hour, I should just skip any remaining question and B-line the exam. To be fair, when you have maybe 2 ½ hours at most, and a whole five paragraph essay, likely with reading attached as one of the sources, this is solid advice, but it also lacked creativity of any kind.

Not exactly the best kind of situation to birth a burgeoning writer, is it?

By this point, I was sick of the formality, and was desperate for some kind of creative release. My literature classes at the time had dedicated freewriting time, but a mere 15 minutes was far from ideal. Thus, I began to write in my free time. They were just paltry ideas at first, excerpts I thought would sound interesting, or ideas stewing in my head but never quite expressed, but they soon developed into a continuous pattern. When I didn’t feel like writing, usually when I was feeling creatively lazy, I instead edited. Shifted sentence structure, messed around with formatting, reassessed direction of ideas and character, and just polished things in a way I never desired before. I’d read and reread my own thoughts, formulating ways I could elicit the meaning or reaction I wanted more precisely, all in the name of making my writing the best it could be. 

As time went on, as Sophomore me turned Junior, to Senior, to Freshman again, and the readings for classes grew more and more advanced, this practice actually began to pervade my reading as well. I’d be absentmindedly reading words, never quite taking them to heart, and suddenly spot a section where I’d think, “This could be worded better.” And have to catch myself five minutes from then having fully comprehend the text and formulating what I think it's trying to say, and how I think it could be better at that. Even now, while I remain an unenthused reader, finding those little sections I feel could be altered is how I’ve managed to keep myself engaged with the text at hand. 

Through my experiences, I've grown from a child who could barely pass a simple spelling test to someone writing in my free time of my own volition. I’ve developed an understanding of what simply coming back to a piece can do, even as a habitual fine editor, or perhaps especially as one. Sometimes we get so desperate for a piece to say something in such an exact way that we lose all sense of flow and structure. Sometimes, we try so hard for a piece to fit some strange restriction placed upon us that we forget what the piece was about to begin with. And sometimes we just need to approach our own piece like its someone else’s, analyzing the form not as the story within, but as plain text on paper, begging to be restated.