Editing

When I was a much younger writer, I hated editing my work. From the age of five onwards to about sixteen I didn’t even see the need for it, so unrefined was my artistic eye, and even when shown the utility of it as seventeen I still didn’t really believe my work *needed* editing all that much. Sure, the odd tweak here and there, but you want me to rip the whole thing apart and start from a single good line? You think this poem should actually be a short story? Too much work! I can’t muster the creative energy to re-do the whole piece! (insert hand-wringing artistic wankery here)… And over my early twenties, rather than learn this patient art, my freewriting devolved into inanity and I ceased to produce at all. Because deep down I still believed that you either had innate talent or you didn’t, and no amount of reworking was going to make the difference fundamentally.

I suppose that deep down inside I was suffering from a) the desire to be brilliant, and b) laziness. Which really characterized my years in university turning out papers the night before they were due and giving them little more than a spell and grammar edit before handing them in. Talk about failing to get the most out of my university years – I left school with only a few more writing tools than I had entered with.

Looking at it now (nine in the morning and I’m supposed to be working) I suppose there were two major influences on my attitude towards editing. Working in professional communications is an obvious one – a decade of writing and editing in a corporate environment will teach you a thing or two about working over your words – even when work itself is dry and uninspiring, many of the goals are the same. You want people to understand your point, and not while tripping over the language to do so. That’s true of poetry or news releases, though in the former “understanding” may be more felt sense than cerebral, no reader wants to come away feeling stupid. But less obvious because it involves a different medium, seven years of playing in a band also twigged me to the reality of creative process in a total way. Because songwriting was a collaborative process for the flying folk, every song we wrote was workshopped over several sessions, words often taken out or added to songs, riffs played then reversed to see what the effect might be, bridges written on the fly to unify verses that otherwise were too straight. Working and re-working was just something that needed to be done in order to unify the creative ideas and ideals of seven very different people. A pleasure I only realize now, the gift of working with such talented people over a long period of time, which taught me that even the most accomplished artists are not simply brilliant, but dedicated to re-working their material, and editing their words.

In the last few months I have felt a renewal in my artistic fortunes, but instead of a band this time it’s a women’s writing circle who meet once a month for snacks and lit crit. Although I’ve steadily increased my writing output in the last couple of years, I have found my work a lot more focused lately, and that feedback from the group is helping me to really discover a joy in editing I haven’t had before. The structure helps, for sure, but I think more than that is the work I am involved in at the moment. Family stories and poems going back a hundred years, fictionalized, embellished, curated in my imagination and spilled back out onto the page. I realized the other day that every time I go back to a particular piece I am rewriting, my mind immediately steps into the story. No longer on the bed with the laptop, I am in the landscape i am writing about within seconds of turning my focus there. I am standing just outside each frame, and I never see what I expect to, each change of phrase changes my view. Transported would be the correct word for it. Involved would be another. Editing allows me back inside my work, whereas first draft writing is hammered out too painfully to give me much reflection time. And even more than the pleasure of re-entering those landscapes is the recognition that re-working is bringing me closer to the brilliance I had (falsely) believed innate in my naivety. Not that I believe my work to be brilliant, but I do think I am turning out the best work of my life to date. And that has a lot to do with the feedback and editing process, the writer’s group, my willingness to tear things apart from the beginning and start over with a handful of good lines. Which is exciting, because not only am I writing, but learning to live alongside the characters and scenes put to the page. Richer material, and more enjoyment in working it.