Having been doing this fiction writing business seriously for over two years, now I have learned a lot. Either from my own mistakes or from fellow writers I have been fortunate to meet through social media or from my own reading and internet research. One of the main things I have learned is to treat much of what I have read from industry experts with a pinch of salt. Everybody is different and so are the ways they approach creativity but I have heard so much about how proper writers must re-write and re-write and re-write ad infinitum. That the first draft written by anybody is always crap. I disagree.
I write what is being processed by my brain at the time and then I self-edit it immediately, whether that means a sentence, a paragraph or a whole scene, because I know what I'm trying to say or do. I need to get it right in the moment I am feeling it. I can’t just write a bunch of crap thinking I can fix it later because if I did, when I went back to fix it, I wouldn't have the same feeling within me. For me it’s a more honest and effective way of creating something.
When I write a scene, for example, I can see it in my head in the same way you would watch something on a screen, everything; the location – be it a dull office or scenic outdoor, what the people are wearing (although I may not describe that), the way the characters are interacting with each other – their mannerisms, their expressions and so on. Not all of it gets turned into words on paper but I use it to express what I mean to the reader so when I get to the end of it I can read what I've just done immediately and tweak things I may have missed or got wrong immediately, while the feeling still exists.
Now that’s not to say that when I finish a first draft that I think it’s perfect because I don’t and I will change it. I make mistakes (grammatical, plot, details) or I may change my mind about what I have written completely . But on the whole when I finish a first draft of a story it, on the whole, it remains the same through the polishing process.
I'm saying this because there are so many things I read which tell me that this is not what ‘professional’ writers do. That ‘professional’ writers spend endless hours worrying about the construct of each and every word and sentence but, for me, that’s an inspiration killer. If I used the words I used it was because it was what my gut instinct at the time suggested I used to convey the feeling I wanted to convey and I think that constant revision ends up watering that down.
So, for people like me, self-editing during the writing works and makes sense. Trust yourself.