Writing Is a Mess. Editing Is Housekeeping.

I’m convinced life always finds ways to humble us. Just as I was celebrating getting into the TorinoFilmLab NeXT – TV Series programme as a Story Editor Trainee last week, a producer gave us this very specific note on our own pilot: “This story needs serious, serious editing.” Oh, well… 🙂

Yes, sure, it stung. But it also gave me another purpose this week as I’ve been going through meetings at TorinoFilmLab. Suddenly, I wasn’t only thinking about how to help other writers understand where their stories stop working and how they might fix them. I was also wondering how I could bring the same thinking back to our own project. So, all week, I closely observed how my mentor approached the projects we’re working on, took notes on his feedback, and kept asking myself: How does this apply to our own story?

And one thing I found reassuring was seeing just how messy the process is supposed to be. You try things, change them, add or take things out until you start to feel that the story is working.

We’ve been working on four very different projects this week, but interestingly, we kept coming back to many of the same story problems: character motivation, tone, what to reveal and when. Seeing the same questions come up in such different stories made this week a very intense learning experience for me.

I was also amazed by how adaptable the writers we’re working with were, always coming back the next day with new solutions to the problems we had discussed before. The progress they made in just one week was quite impressive. Watching them reshape their stories so quickly made me feel much more hopeful about going back to ours. It reminded me how much a story can change once you’re willing to let go of one solution and try another.

I guess that’s why writing has to be messy. We are creating something that wasn’t there before. We try things, change our minds, leave things in the wrong place, and sometimes collect more than we need. In that sense, editing feels a little like housekeeping. You look around, decide what belongs where, what needs to go, and what you actually want others to see before inviting them into your house.

Next week, I’ll sit down with my writing partner and return to our pilot, hopefully with a little more distance and some new tools I’ve picked up from my mentor this week. And I’m sure one question in particular will echo in my head, in my mentor’s lovely Italian accent: “Why doesn’t the main character run away at the first sign of trouble?”