ManicDDaily

I have written several posts in the past about blocking writer’s block.  (If you are interested, these can be found by clicking the category “writer’s block” from the ManicDDaily home page.)

I am extremely lucky that I don’t typically suffer from writer’s block.  I can usually write something. The quality of that something may not be great, but I can put words down on the page.   A harder problem is re-writing.

The wonderful glow that comes from a first draft, or even a first edit, is generally not available in the hard, repetitive, slog of revising a major project.   When one first writes something, one often feels happy simply at finding coherence, flow.  For someone who grew up before the days of the computer, there’s a wonder simply in seeing one’s thoughts set out in typeface (rather than scribble).

But as one’s investment and expectations grow, the re-writing can become onerous.  Questions plague every re-writing session.  They tend to run along the lines of:

1.  What else can you cut?   (It’s still too wordy, boring.)

2.  Have you cut too much?  (You’ve squeezed all the life out.)

3.  Are you really making it better?

4.   How can this take so much time?

5.  It was a dumb idea to begin with.  (And that’s not even a question.)

6.   Maybe you should just quit.  (After all this time?)

Avoiding the burden of extensive revision is one of the joys of a daily blog.  (While you have to worry about coming up with something all day long, at least you know you won’t have much time to re-write it!)

But if you are a attempting a novel, a story, even a poem, you usually have to rework it quite a bit.   And, unless you are lucky enough to have a deadline and an editing staff, this process simply takes as long as it takes (often long enough for you to get thoroughly sick of it).

Sometimes you have to cut out whole sections, sections that you have labored over for weeks, sections that you had a particular love for.  (These may be the most suspect.)  You will feel a bit like you are working on a  crossword, and a whole corner needs to be erased.  (Only, frankly, you’ll likely feel much much worse.)

For me, the most important rule in re-writing is simply to keep faith with yourself.  You must be open to cutting, but if you constantly question the worth of your entire project, you will not be able to go through the hard slog of making it better.

Perhaps the concept is not worthy of James Joyce.  (But remember, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, begins: “once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road…”  This, though recognized as great prose now, undoubtedly took a fair amount of ego and faith on Joyce’s  part.)

Even so, you must accept that you write about the kinds of things that you write about.   Even the moocows.  (Especially the moocows.)

Try, at least, to make your writing the best that it can be before giving into the urge to throw it away.   (Even then, keep the moocow.)