Sitting with Edits

Photo Thanks to Tram Mau Tri Tam

I’ve been spending a lot of my edge time editing. Edge time is time that I have on the edges on my schedule. Frankly there isn’t much. But every few years I get to edit something meaningful. I’ve been working on someone else’s stuff while also writing a few things of my own in the last months. More on that later.

One thing I’ve noticed about editing—my own and other people’s work—is that the space between the readings is the space where the writer grows. That’s particularly true if you sit with the edits long enough to learn from them. The same is true in a verbatim seminar, in a class, or in a meeting with members or stakeholders or friends. The longer you sit with what’s said, the more impact what’s said has.

Feedback is only as good as you allow it be. If it’s dispensable, you’ll dispense with it. Of course, my post is about editing. All those tracked changes can instruct you, change you, improve your ability to communicate. But you have to take the risk and let that happen.

You have to choose to be vulnerable, to admit to poor word choice, to accept that your phrase was confusing, and to surrender to another option. That option may not be what the editor suggests, what you at a different time might choose. But another option may be the route toward clearer, tighter sentences.

Another thing I’ve noticed about editing is that it helps the editing process to pause. There is always space between words in a sentence. Even though there’s only one space after periods, it’s still a space worth respecting.

Giving myself time to think through the questions of my editors or to notice my own literary proclivities or to see how many times I use passive voice will make me a stronger communicator. It’ll make me a poet. It’ll charge my words. It’ll engage me, and an engaged me eventuates into a engaged sentence.

Role of an Editor

The role of the editor is an intimate one because she reads your mistakes and judges your intent and suggests an alternative path to your goal.  As much as we think we do, we never like alternative paths.  We like what we know, words we’re married to, what we’ve spent days writing toward.

An editor sees your gaps, can exploit your errors rather than clarify your efforts, and help you listen to you, to your words, and to the hopes underneath them.  Like a guide, she takes in your hardest-won words and makes them better.

An editor can damage you.  An editor can discourage you.  Or an editor can draw a simple, clear line between your work and your end.  She can look ahead and see the page when you can only see the sentence.  She can show you that there’s more in you without suggesting your earlier presentation as inferior.

Her words return again and again: “There’s more.  There’s more in you.  Go for it.  Go.  See.  Soar.”

About Your Writing

When we talked yesterday about your writing–about the list of books in your mind, the list you went down without any effort, the list that included chapter outlines, themes, and topics in you like blood–I hope you heard me despite my firm and sometimes spicy presentation.  I hope you heard in my words the evidence that there are people waiting for you to get the work done.  I hope you heard, in me, the readers who would not only be open to your book(s) but who would be excited about it.  Interested in it.  Generous with it.

I hope you never lose the sense that you are not done until you are faithful to the conviction you told me about, that long strand of material sitting in you and expecting to be given to readers of your printed words, listeners to your spoken words.  I hope you are upset in an essential way until you respond.

I hope you connect your head, your heart, and your hands, and that the work of your hands proves to you that it’s about those accepting your work with gladness as much as it is about you completing something so internal to you.  I hope you realize that whatever has stalled you has stalled those of us who will read your stuff.

I hope you get through your resistance, your fears, however real they are.  I hope that you write and that you publish and that we can laugh about how hard I came at you even though I really didn’t have the right to say what I said.  I hope I was speaking out of my own reactions to the welled up, stored up, waiting up work in you but also for the audience that is expecting.

Victor Lavalle on Writing and Revising

I’m finishing Victor Lavalle’s latest novel, The Devil in Silver, a story about inmates in a mental hospital who befriend each other while fighting a known but unknown devil and an increasingly unresponsive health system.  These videos aren’t about Victor’s novel but writing itself; he reads a good bit of a story in the video and discusses it the way he would in one of his classes.  I hope you learn from him.  It’s helpful if you’re writing now or revising.

Writing Is Frustration

“I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”

–Philip Roth