The "editing" trend on TikTok is mostly video editing. People showing their workflow, their transitions, their color grading, their before-and-afters. And yes, I've been watching those. My own TikTok editing has gotten sharper over the past year for exactly that reason, you watch enough people who are better than you and some of it sticks. But what I keep thinking about, every time the algorithm serves me another editing video, is how badly I want to grab whoever's watching and say: this principle is EVERYWHERE. Editing is not a skill you apply to footage. Editing is a way of seeing. And if you're making anything at all, songs, videos, writing, the story you tell about yourself, you need it more than almost anything else in your toolkit.
I'm currently deep in the recording phase of the record I'm making, which means I'm currently deep in editing hell. So this might be therapeutic as much as instructional. Bear with me.
what editing actually is (and what it isn't)
People conflate editing with fixing. They think editing is what you do when something went wrong, when the take wasn't clean, when the paragraph doesn't make sense, when the cut is jarring. That's not editing. That's repair. Repair is necessary but it's not the same thing.
Real editing is CHOOSING. The active ongoing practice of deciding what belongs and what doesn't, not based on whether it works in isolation but based on whether it serves the thing you're building. And here's the kicker: some of the stuff that doesn't belong is actually good. That's the part that wrecks people. If you were cutting obviously bad material, editing would be easy. The hard part is cutting the stuff that's good but wrong. The line that's clever but stops the flow. The section you worked on for days but makes the song too long. The bit of footage that's beautiful but breaks the rhythm. Good but wrong is the hardest thing to kill. And you have to kill it.
There's a quote attributed to Faulkner, though honestly who knows at this point, about killing your darlings. Murder your darlings. The things you love most are often the first things that need to go, because you love them for the wrong reasons. You love them because you made them, because they were hard, because you remember the moment you got them right. The song or the page doesn't care about any of that. It only asks: does this serve me?
cutting songs: the specific torture of killing what you loved
The record I'm working on has gone through three structural overhauls in the time I've been at it. I started with seventeen songs. I am currently at thirteen. I may end at eleven or twelve, depending on what the listening reveals when I'm far enough away from the making of it to hear it clearly.
The four songs that are no longer on the record didn't stop being good songs. Two of them I still genuinely love. One of them has a bridge I consider to be some of the best writing I've done. They came off because they interrupted something. Because the sequencing of the record is its own argument and those songs were making a different argument. Keeping them would have been self-indulgent. it would have been me choosing my own attachment over the record's coherence.
I cut them during one session at maybe 1am where I was going back and forth, listening to the whole thing in order, making notes, and I remember the exact moment I heard where the problem was. It was like a wrong note, suddenly audible, can't be unheard. I pulled the track. Made a folder called "don't put these back on the record" because I knew I'd be tempted. The folder exists. The songs are in it. I have resisted the temptation so far.
There's also the within-track editing, which is its own ongoing war. Verses that go a line too long. A chorus that repeats once more than it needs to. A pre-chorus that made sense at the demo stage but the album version doesn't need it. These feel small but they're not. A song that's twenty seconds too long is a listener that checked out before the end. Twenty seconds is the difference between a moment landing and evaporating. Every second is load-bearing in a short-form world where three minutes feels long.
cutting videos: the four-second rule I made up and swear by
I edit all my own TikToks and YouTube content. Not because I have a lot of time, I don't, I'm making a record, time is theoretical, but because I can't not. I have tried handing editing to other people twice and both times I took it back, not because they were bad at it but because the editing reveals your priorities and I need my priorities to be in the cut.
My rule, which I invented after watching too many of my own videos that ran long: if something hasn't happened within the first four seconds, something is wrong with the opening. This sounds brutal. It is brutal. Welcome to short-form. The hook has to be there. Not the product, not the setup, the hook. The thing that tells the viewer's brain "this is going somewhere interesting, stay." If you don't establish that by the four-second mark, you're losing people and you don't get them back.
I've started applying this to songs too, which I didn't expect. The first four bars set the terms. The listener's brain is doing the same calculation: is this going somewhere? Is this going somewhere for ME? The recording videos I've been watching made me look at my own song intros differently. A few of them needed to be trimmed. One of them needed to start two bars later than I'd written it. The song is better. I am still a little annoyed about it.
cutting words: why every draft is a draft
I started writing these blog posts partly because someone told me I should and partly because I had things to say that were too long for captions and too structured for video. What I didn't anticipate is how much writing would sharpen my editing in general. Because writing is pure editing, every draft is an argument about what stays and what goes, and the only way you get to a good draft is through multiple bad ones you've been honest enough to cut up.
The thing I've learned: the first draft is always 30% longer than it should be. Always. Because the first draft is you figuring out what you want to say, which means a lot of scaffolding that's useful for you but noise for the reader. The scaffolding has to come out. The warmup sentences at the top of a paragraph, the ones that do nothing but approach the actual point, those come out. The throat-clearing. The "and so" and "but anyway" connective tissue. The explanation of what you just said, which you added because you weren't sure the original version landed. If it landed, cut the explanation. If it didn't land, fix the original, don't paper over it with commentary.
I go through my own drafts like a sculptor. What's the shape inside and what's rock that needs to come off? The posts I'm happiest with are the ones where by the final version I can't find anything left to cut. That's the goal: so tight that removal would hurt. That standard makes the work better and also slower, which is why I'm currently rewriting a bridge for the record at midnight more nights than I'd like to admit.
the bridge, and what it cost me
Speaking of bridges. There is one song on this record, I'm not going to name it yet, that had an original bridge I wrote in one sitting, in about twenty minutes, and immediately knew was something. It was the kind of writing you feel in your chest while you're doing it. Six lines and every one of them right. I tracked a demo vocal over it. Listened back. Felt good about myself for an afternoon, which is rare and precious.
Then I sat with the full song for a week. And the bridge, the bridge I loved, the bridge that was good, was too much. The song had already said the thing. The bridge was saying it again, louder. It was the songwriter being proud of her work instead of trusting the listener. I'd written a bridge that announced itself as a bridge instead of just being part of the song.
I cut the whole thing and wrote a new one in a different structural position. The new bridge is shorter, quieter, and does less. It does exactly the right less. The song is now the best thing on the record, probably. I keep the old bridge in my notebook. It will never be recorded. It was good. It was wrong. This is how it goes.
taste is a muscle you build by killing things
Taste is not a talent you're born with. It's not a quality you either have or don't. Taste is the accumulated practice of noticing what's wrong and being honest enough about it to fix it even when fixing it costs you something. Every time you kill a darling, really kill it and not just set it aside where you can go back to it, you sharpen the instrument. You teach yourself what "right" feels like by repeatedly choosing it over "mine."
The best editors I know, in music, in film, in writing, all describe the same experience: at a certain point you hear or see the problem before you can articulate it. Your body knows before your brain catches up. That's taste. And it is entirely learnable. It just costs you a lot of things you made and loved. The price is worth paying.
The record I'm building is better for everything I've cut out of it. Measurably, audibly better. And when it's done, you won't hear the missing pieces. You'll just hear the thing that's left, tight and honest and doing exactly what it needs to do. That's the goal. That's always the goal.
Now I have to go kill something I love. The bridge, again. It'll be fine.