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I'm editing something so I can post it, trying to make the language a little less like ... ah, well.
Trying to cut out a few of the two dozen semicolons (and taking out a few of the dozen colons, too). Trying to cut some of the parallel structure, because I overuse it to the point of repetition. Being especially brutal with the parallel structure when it uses colons and semicolons, because the combination is almost recursively idiosyncratic. Pity that's not like a double negative, canceling out itself; instead the piece just ends up all the more complex. Murdering my darlings, which for me is often the em dash. Trimming down a bit of length, tightening and tautening—but it's things just like this which get me, you see: I love wordplay, a touch of consonance, pairs and triplicates of the similar-but-unique; I revel in and depend on excessive punctuation to draw boarders 'round the edges of my long sentences. This is how I think and talk, and so it is how I write.
In other words: I am editing a piece of my writing so that it is a little less like me.
That sounds inherently negative (preserve and value self-identity! of course), but it's not. My love of punctuation really is excessive. My penchant for repetition really does slow pacing. (Some of my moderately old fanfic pains me to read, now, because it's become so obvious that if I'd trimmed it just a bit, it would have improved quite a lot.) These changes are changes for the better.
But each time I excise an em dash or rearrange or redefine a sentence to avoid a semicolon, a little part of me—the part which knows "kill your darlings" means also "they are your darlings"—cringes. This piece needs this level of editing, because it's somewhat strange in its own right and doesn't need to be overly complicated by my stylistic eccentricity, but as much as I know the third colon-separated, semicolon-divided list needs to go I end up staring at it for a bit first, thinking, "ah, but it is such a pretty sentence—and it matches the others so well!"
Still, it has to go.
Trying to cut out a few of the two dozen semicolons (and taking out a few of the dozen colons, too). Trying to cut some of the parallel structure, because I overuse it to the point of repetition. Being especially brutal with the parallel structure when it uses colons and semicolons, because the combination is almost recursively idiosyncratic. Pity that's not like a double negative, canceling out itself; instead the piece just ends up all the more complex. Murdering my darlings, which for me is often the em dash. Trimming down a bit of length, tightening and tautening—but it's things just like this which get me, you see: I love wordplay, a touch of consonance, pairs and triplicates of the similar-but-unique; I revel in and depend on excessive punctuation to draw boarders 'round the edges of my long sentences. This is how I think and talk, and so it is how I write.
In other words: I am editing a piece of my writing so that it is a little less like me.
That sounds inherently negative (preserve and value self-identity! of course), but it's not. My love of punctuation really is excessive. My penchant for repetition really does slow pacing. (Some of my moderately old fanfic pains me to read, now, because it's become so obvious that if I'd trimmed it just a bit, it would have improved quite a lot.) These changes are changes for the better.
But each time I excise an em dash or rearrange or redefine a sentence to avoid a semicolon, a little part of me—the part which knows "kill your darlings" means also "they are your darlings"—cringes. This piece needs this level of editing, because it's somewhat strange in its own right and doesn't need to be overly complicated by my stylistic eccentricity, but as much as I know the third colon-separated, semicolon-divided list needs to go I end up staring at it for a bit first, thinking, "ah, but it is such a pretty sentence—and it matches the others so well!"
Still, it has to go.
