The art of editing

I'm almost halfway to my chosen word count of 100k words and after finishing what will be chapter twelve, made a start on the next chapter.
It was whilst writing this next chapter that I realised that I had made the story incredibly hard by introducing an element a little too prematurely. Now to be fair, this element just seemed to write itself; I’d had no intention or even any idea that this element existed until I typed it and I love it when these things happen because they usually tie into the story extremely well. This particular element could tie in quite nicely and could certainly explain an incident that happens later. Except that I had written half of chapter thirteen, which is quite a necessary chapter, before realising that it just wouldn’t work at this point.
I have spent this evening editing and re-writing the end of chapter twelve, which was extremely easy: I just had to cut the original end of the chapter and paste it at the end of the document to be looked at when I feel the time is right to re-introduce it, and then write a different ending for the chapter. Except that I now have the task of looking at chapter thirteen and it is not going to be as easy. A small part of me dreads the editing ahead of me, while, thankfully, a much larger part can’t wait to get stuck in.
It was as I was editing chapter twelve that it occurred to me that this entire story has been re-written over and over again. I write something and then delete the whole thing weeks or months later because I’m not happy with it. While the idea of the original story is still in there, it has morphed into something that I’d certainly never envisaged when I’d first put pen to paper almost eighteen months ago. It makes me wonder how much of the writing I am currently doing is actually going to survive into the final product. It’s quite insane to think that things that aren’t on page yet are going to end up being deleted and re-written in the future – how bizarre and faintly ridiculous. It’s at times like these when I can’t stop my brain from racing ahead when I wonder what all of this furious tapping on my keyboard is in aid of.
But then I remind myself that nobody manages to write a first draft that doesn’t need tweaking. Every single writer out there, from Anne Rice to J.R.R. Tolkien has looked at their first, second and possibly even their twentieth draft and made necessary changes to ensure that the reader finds the story seamless.
I suppose that I can only hope that all of this editing pays off in the end.