A Collection of Rooms

I am having a dialogue with a fellow writer. We are discussing the difficulties of revising good writing, lamenting at how, when the words themselves have a seamless flow, it is a chore to cut up sections and sentences and try to stitch them back together. We also acknowledged that it is difficult for us to use other people's suggestions for writing. At this point, I came up with the following:

To use an analogy, if somebody is looking at your blueprints for a house and they hand you a schematic and say that you should put a bay window on the east wall, that bay window may be nice in a different house, but it would look gaudy in yours. But you keep thinking of a bay window, and maybe you two weeks later design your own bay window that looks lovely and perfectly fits into your original blueprint. Or maybe you decide that there is no way to make an attractive bay window, but it got you thinking about an addition to the east side wall and you put in a sun room. But no matter what you do or where the ideas came from, it was your work, because it is your blueprint and your creation, and that is the only way to make a whole house and not just a collection of rooms.

I am perfectly happy to revise writing in general. I am perfectly happy to have information in digestible sections. But there needs to be cohesion throughout the piece. The sections need to have a parallel structure. They need to have a common voice. They need to all be using the same style guide. If every section stands alone, but they fail to stand together, then it's like trying to build a house by slapping individual rooms together. (And in case you didn't know, it doesn't work that way, and if you tried it, you would find it hideous.)

I personally find the only way to do it is to have one author using their one voice to actually write the words. Other people may have input. They may even have an equal share of what gets put into the writing. But when each person writes their own sections and they slap it together, or if one person edits by cutting sentences and inserting their own, it makes an inferior document. (At the very least, after such an editing process, one writer should then revise the edits to give it one cohesive voice/sound.)

Because I find this to be a truth, I apply both to taking advice and giving it. Although I do rewrite other people's sentences from time to time, I am for more likely to just offer suggestions for replacements to writers, partly to force them to think and keep improving (and not rely as much on editors to fix issues), and partly to make sure that they retain their voice throughout their writing.