Office Hours

The flavor of one's edits.

Q.

Hi George,

Thank you so much for continuing to engage with the wonderful community you've created.

My question, (like so many before it) is about editing. You talk about rereading your pieces with a Positive/Negative meter and making micro decisions until the piece has been beaten into the shape it needs to take. But how do you stack these decisions together?

Essentially, I struggle with bridging the gap between line editing and structural editing. If I'm rereading my story with my P/N meter, I can only get a fraction of the way through a story, even a very short story, before I have to call it quits for the day. And then the next day, I situate myself by rereading the previous day's section, which means I have more limited time to P/N my way through a slightly smaller fraction, the next day an even smaller fraction, etc.

So how do you P/N through a 5000-7500 word story, focusing line by line, without losing sight of the larger piece?

Thank you so much, and if the real, impolite answer is that some people simply have more word processing power than others, I'll accept it with grace.

Q.

Right, excellent question.

I want to start, as usual, by emphasizing that all of these ideas – for example, the concept of the P/N meter – are just that: ideas. 

The P/N idea approximates what I’m doing on a given day, sort of.  But it might not prove to be useful to you, dear questioner, or to anyone, at all.

Sometimes my ideas about my writing don’t work for me either and have to be scrapped or re-understood.  And I really mean that.  No matter how confidently I talk about some writing-related concept, they’re all just metaphors.  

Corinthians says: “Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way,” etc.  Beautiful and, we feel, somehow true – but this is just a (gorgeous, apt) metaphor – it’s not love itself.  Reading it doesn’t provoke the feeling of being in love, or cause us to fall in love, and our experience of love will always involve more than what’s on that list.

Likewise, when someone offers up a writing metaphor, even if it’s a good one, and rings a bell for us – it’s not the thing itself.  It’s not the state one is actually in, when revising well. 

It’s just, as we Buddhists say in another context, “the finger pointing at the moon.”

Reality is reality and concepts are concepts: inadequate word-wrappings, generated out of need, always insufficient.

And yet…metaphors are good.  We need them, we rely on them.  They are, above all, supposed to help us.

So, part of our job as artists is to always be asking: “Is the metaphor (method) I’m currently using still actually helping me?”

How do we know?

Well, I try to ask myself, now and then (openly, honestly): “Am I making progress?  (Is the work, roughly speaking, longer and better than it was three months ago? Or, even: is it, though shorter than it was three months ago, is it better? )

I don’t insist on constant, linear growth (I know better), but I try to be watchful for any hint that I might be involved in a downward neurotic spiral (DNS). 

There’s a certain feeling I recognize, that signals a DNS: suddenly everything in the piece goes to shit – nothing holds up, it’s all fake, there’s no value, even in lines that I’ve liked for months or years.

When I get this feeling, it may mean that I’m misapplying my own method – applying it too literally.  Applying only it, if you will.

I’ve gotten on to AutoPilot and am serving the method rather than the work.

If I feel this happening, I try to not feel bad or beat myself up about it. Rather, I just try to think: “Huh, interesting. Well, we don’t want that to happen.  Hmm, what can we do about it?”

From your question, it seems that maybe (maybe?) the P/N meter idea is causing, or permitting, you to feel that if you just revise a certain section over and over….you’ll have done so sufficiently.

That the point has become, maybe, become going-over-it, rather than the result. 

You may remember the old joke:

Guy goes into the doctor, raises his arm over his head, says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”

Doctor: “Don’t do that.”

This joke has lots of applications in the world of creative writing.

Here, dear questioner, you might just want to forbid yourself from “doing that.”  That is: if you find yourself “perfecting” smaller and smaller swaths of prose – don’t. 

Don’t do it.

Stop yourself from doing that.

How?  Well, one quick suggestion, on the tactical level: print out the whole (5,000-7,000 word) thing, and read it from beginning to end, lightly marking it up as you go – but don’t make any changes in the word processing document until you’ve read it all the way to the end.  And don’t get too hung up.  Just keep reading along, marking lightly. (Sometimes, if I hit an area that is a big mess, I’ll just make a scribble in the margin, indicating: “Much to be done here.  Try it at the keyboard?”)

The point is to get through the whole thing, roughly at-speed, at about the same pace that a “real” reader would.

Then let the piece sit a bit – go for a walk or listen to some music or do the dishes or something.

While doing (let’s say) the dishes, try to enact a slightly playful/forgiving/generous feeling toward the work, like this: “Oh, little story, you don’t have to do everything – you just have to do something.”  And/or: “Sure, of course, there’ll be lumps in you, and imperfect places, and bad word choices, but when I go back to reading (once I’ve finished these dishes), I just want to see, generally, what we’ve got going here – feel around for interest, for viability; find out what your strengths are.” 

And/or: “Of course, I’ll scribble in any ideas that come to me, of course, but my mindset (once I’ve finished this last dish) is going to be one of generosity for you, my poor little text, sitting up there nervously, waiting for me to return, hoping to please me.  You poor dear!  We’re in this together, after all, and it’s all just for fun.  If you have lumps in you, or imperfections, or unclear places, nobody dies, after all.”

Then go up, make those light marks, print it out, and take off for the rest of the day.

Next day: repeat. 

Lean, that is, in the direction of liking, and rooting for, your piece.  Give it the benefit of the doubt, and some room to breathe (to be incorrect or wobbly or unfinished in places, for a few drafts).  This is the way a story “thinks” – by the writer allowing its blemishes and imperfections to abide, long enough that they may prove to be instructive. 

If we’re too harsh, the story locks up and stops talking back to us.

So, what we’re talking about here is learning to edit in the right spirit.

And there can also be a pre-writing component to this. 

We can sit down to write feeling happy, a little charged-up, looking forward to amusing or pleasing a reader, slightly in love with life, and so on. 

For me, that’s a good state of mind for writing.

Or we can feel: anxious to get our time in, harboring neurotic doubts about the story that have less to do with the story than with the mood we’re in; fearful, rather than joyful. We can be writing from a  place of (mere) ambition (“more fame, please”), rather than from a place of curiosity.

Those aren’t good states of mind for me to write from, and the qualities of my edits will reflect this. 

If I’m writing without joy (without fun, enthusiasm, love) my edits become too analytical and preventative.  I am trying to avoid mistakes rather than throw a good party.  I am assuming that if I just do this one thing (honor the dang method), all will be well. 

But writing is too complex for that; it shuns a method.

What it likes, is a good, brave aspiration.

So, dear questioner: is there something you can do, pre-writing, that will make you excited about the potentially wonderful effect you are going to have on your reader?     

Something that taps into your twenty-year-old former self’s dreams of being a writer?  (That one always works for me.)

Something that excites you about the possibility of future success? 

Something that helps you see your work-in-progress as a gift you can’t wait to give to the world, instead of as a mistake you might be in the process of making, and must prevent? (I should say – I don’t find any evidence in your question, whatsoever, that you feel this way about your work.  This is more, uh…me talking to myself here.)

Every second we spend writing, we are enacting a stance toward life itself.

The way we ought to feel, according to me: “I am in this dream called life, living it, sometimes feeling trapped in it, sometimes feeling blessed to be in it, and I want – well, I want to leave something lovely behind, for those who will follow me (and for those who are out there in it with me right now), something that, through its complicated beauty, will bear testimony to how crazy and intense and nice it was being here.  I hope to reassure and console with this work.  (But not falsely.)”

When we’re revising well, we are working out of the spirit of our particular (aspirational, best-case) mission statement. 

I’m guessing not many of us would admit to having this mission statement: “Don’t screw it up.” But sometimes, when we’re editing, let’s admit it: this attitude can slip in.  It’s a harsh attitude and an unforgiving one, one that, at heart, doesn’t want us to win. 

And yet – some of us never learn to edit rigorously enough to cause our prose to become its best self. 

So there’s a bit of a Goldilocks thing going on here: we want our editing to be not too harsh, not too lax…but just right.

For those of us who want to be read by other people – who believe that the whole process is an attempt to enact intimacy between reader and writer and that, therefore, the writer should care what the reader is experiencing – this P/N meter can be a useful way of approaching revision.

Each of you will have your own mission statements (and please feel free to offer them in the Comments, if you do have one, or want to take a crack at coming up with one).

But also, I should say, in conclusion, that there are good writers who don’t work this way; people for whom imagining one’s reader is not the goal: people who rely on their own feelings as they are writing, whose process involves imagining a thing, describing it as well as they can, and moving on, content that they’ve taken their best crack at it; people for whom editing is more lapidary than exploratory.  (From some of the stuff I’ve been reading about Faulkner lately, he was, or claimed to be, of this lineage – not a big fan of revising, apparently.)  This school of thought believes in inspiration, more than development, I’d say – or they believe that inspiration comes, or doesn’t, in the moment of doing, and that’s that.

But I’m not that kind of writer.  (I know this just by comparing any of my Draft 2s with the corresponding Draft 1000.)  And, if I’m being honest, I think most people aren’t that kind of writer. I’m not sure that, his own statements notwithstanding, that Faulkner was that kind of writer. 

Maybe, rather than their being two different types of writers (the Heavy Revisers and the Non-Revisers), each of us exists somewhere on that continuum.  At different points in our careers – at different points within the same story – we move back and forth along that continuum.

I like this idea, because it means that sometimes I need to work and rework a section to get it to sing (i.e., I am working in the Heavy Revisers lineage), and at other times (even a few lines later, in the same story) I just get it, the very first time, and am thereby a happy member of the Non-Revisers lineage.

Whatever works.

And speaking of good, brave aspirations: rest in peace, Alexei Nevalny. Someone sent me this photo, from Instagram, of Nevalny reading what I assume is the Russian translation of “Lincoln in the Bardo.”