The Madness of Editing

Uh, this is getting out of hand.

Stacked helter-skelter on my table with pages upon pages of what my professor calls “Rainbow Drafts”. Every time I cross and re-cross my legs, a new colored pen I forgot was sitting on my lap falls onto the floor. My friends approach me — I’m sitting in the student dining hall — but when they see the feral look in my eyes, they back away slowly.

I have been listening to haunted merry-go-round music for hours on repeat.

The rewriting process has begun.

I wonder how many others have fallen prey to the catastrophe we call the editing process. The idea of tweaking our work, until we’ve ripped our stories apart word by word. “Not descriptive enough! Bad first line! Too on the nose! Clarify! Clarify! Clarify!” Right now I’m staring at the creatures I’ve made disassembling my stories and sewing the pieces back together into some horrible monstrosity.  Fragments of my narrative flying everywhere and landing every which way. In my mind, it’s a cohesive story. 

I always heard “Write without fear. Edit without mercy,” but this is ridiculous.

My muse, however, has been patient with me in this madness. Despite the destruction I’ve caused to my creations, there is still imagination. I’m creating something new from what was once lifeless sentences and passive verbs. Reanimating the dead. What could possibly go wrong??

Surely there is a way out of this insanity.

Kill Your Darlings.

William Faulkner penned the iconic words which have been spoken to many a writer time and time again. “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

Brutal, yes. Helpful, absolutely.

Basically it means if it doesn’t work, it has to go, no matter how much you love it. Our characters, our fun sentences, our little inside jokes that make us laugh have to work with our audience. If it doesn’t, it gets the axe.

I loved the idea of incorporating a journal entry into one of my stories.  The only problem was that I was putting it into the most suspenseful scene of the piece — suspense doesn’t really translate into a journal entry well. A journal is meant to recount events. So if you’re writing an entry, you’re probably past the danger which dissolved all the suspense of the scene. I loved my journal scene. But it didn’t work. I had to kill my darling.

We’re In This Together.

A writer is often romanticized as a lone-wolf. I know I always imagined writers alone in their office or introverted corner booth at a cafe as they stitch together stories from their imaginations. 

Of course, leaving a writer’s mind to fester on its own is a disaster waiting to happen. That’s probably how the abomination-of-a-screenplay for Plan 9 From Outer Space was conceived.

My worst writing moments come in the dead of night when I have no one to protect me from my own imagination.  That’s the time I come up with such profound ideas such as “Pirate Hole: a place of rest and relaxation for pirates.” Yeah, by sunrise, the idea of “Pirate Hole” hissed at the rising light, spat venom, and disintegrated into unholy ashes.

I had a team of trusted editors take a look at my pieces recently. Their feedback was great and provided some great insight. Their critiques gave me some solid ground to stand on. I knew what worked, what to build up, and what to drop. No more Frankenstein cutting and sewing.

An End In Sight.

I’m not out of the woods yet. I’ve still got quite a bit of rewriting to do. But my deadline looms close by. As stressful as it is to get all this work done, at least there is an end in sight. By April, the words and phrases haphazardly melded together will be complete. I guess time will tell if my monster project is genius or madness.

How has the rewriting process treated you? What are some ways you keep sane as you revise?