A FOUR STEP PROCESS FOR WRITING

WRITE, EVALUATE, FIX, LET GO.

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

I have just spent an excruciating week editing (yet again) my manuscript to go off to the developmental editor. Feels like the thousandth time I've gone over the same field.

It's probably not as tiring as being a miner, but it did make my back hurt and my head feel like it was full of mushy noodles. The English language for all its beauty and complexity can certainly challenge you with multiple ways of saying the same thing. Just when you think, aha, that's the best way of expressing this idea, if you leave it alone for an hour or two, when you come back something else will have occurred to you. (Better fix that!) Hence, writing takes a lot of brainpower.

And throw in the fact that, unless you are brilliant at technology and shifting things around with ease, there's another thing to wear you down.

I've come to the conclusion that perhaps I am not really suited to writing long form. My memoir (if a traditional publisher were to even look at it) should be in the range of 50,000 to 70,000 words. Mine comes in at just over 44,000. Even at that, there are things in it that make me wonder if they really “fit”. Do they really advance the story, or are they just backstory so that the reader can understand why I did the crazy things I did.

Perhaps I am more suited to writing shorter pieces. Flash fiction, poems, journalistic pieces for magazines, a novella maybe?

I remember my first memoir teacher explaining to us that writing a book was a marathon, not a sprint. Mine has felt like a couple of marathons, run back to back without the benefit of a training schedule beforehand.

As Garrison Keillor says, "It is noble to delete." It makes me think of the famous writer Jane Austen, and now that it is the 250th anniversary of her birth, tributes are coming her way, left, right and centre. Alongside the brilliance of her prose, I have to think about how difficult it must have been not have the use of a word processor. Imagine not being able to just shift text around, like some complex puzzle, delete huge chunks that don't work, and check spelling and grammar at the press of the right button. Of course, I don't think she ever accidentally lost a file, which is something I've run across. Fortunately for the world, I'm no Jane Austen, so it was no big loss to the world of literature.

Will I do a second book? Possibly, maybe after I recover from doing this one. Once my back no longer hurts and I feel more normal and competent than I do just now.

I do know this: if I do a second book, I will not edit it to death, as I have this one. I will write it, leave it, look at it in a few week's time, rewrite it, send it off to an editor, take their comments to heart and possibly change my text, and ta-da! That's it. No more multiple, multiple, multiple edits and fussing over multiple people's opinions, especially when they sometimes conflict.

No, just do it, evaluate it, fix it, let it go. This is going to be my 4 step mantra.

I'm going to embroider that on a pillow.

Comments, as always, ever so welcome!