a love letter to editing

Tomorrow starts news editing week.

This is my third time teaching news reporting at UK, and each semester, I get excited when we discuss news editing. We only devote a little bit of time to it because the students will go on to take a whole course on news editing. So this is just meant to set them up for what comes next—not unlike a strong story transition, which I will teach about in class tomorrow.

My week is doubly focused on editing: Now that I’ve finished updating and adding to my news editing presentation for class, my biggest task for today is reading and editing the most recent draft of my book, which I finished last Monday.

I’ve been letting it sit all week, while my husband Loui finished reading the final few chapters and my friend Kris read the draft start to finish for the first time since 2023. After I sent him the draft, Kris asked what version this was so he could put it at the top of his notes. (We’re both very committed to our well-organized Notion pages.)

I checked my Alice Dunnigan folder on my laptop. This was my eleventh draft overall and my fourth full draft. As I explained to Loui when he asked, those seven non-full drafts were when I only made minor changes or maybe when I only wrote three chapters before starting over again.

Looking at all the versions was a reminder: Editing is a lot of work. It’s daunting and it’s nearly never-ending.

So why do I love it?

There’s almost nothing in the world more satisfying to me than identifying a problem in my writing and then fixing it. And there’s nothing more gratifying than going through for another edit and realizing you already got something right. It’s like a puzzle that I love solving, and it’s perpetual proof that I’m better today than I was yesterday—or better in 2026, finishing draft eleven/four, than I was in 2023, when I finished draft nine/three, or in 2020, when I started draft one, or in 2018, when I wrote about Alice for the very first time.

Editing is a promise: There’s always next time.