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.

“Writing…an often painful task”

Michael Eric Dyson’s brilliance with many things glows in this and other paragraphs as he writes about the fractures in his relationship with Cornel West. In this quote, he’s talking writing. If you’re interested in what else he says, visit here. Among our other impressions of his overall critique, we should pray for the folks mentioned here. They are part of an intellectual community that shapes and influences the opinions of our best practitioners. My point is to underline what Dyson says of the work of writing.

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

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.”

Poetry for the Day: Writing

Writing by Joyce Rupp

I wait out sluggish days,

empty evenings, mulish

attempts to capture words

hiding themselves

inside the undulating sea

of my mental thesaurus,

not even remotely available

for me to scoot them

onto my fingers and

into necessary revision.

So I wait, and wait,

and wait some more

while I fumble uselessly

with worthless concoctions

until

one early dawn

the tide comes in

and the first word peeks out.

then they all follow,

and like a flock of gulls

I swoop in to snatch

the sea’s latest prey.

Why Should It Mean So Much

Dag Hammarskjold, a twentieth-century diplomat, advisor, and leader is a companion of mine (through the text).  I read selections from his Markings from time to time.  They are poems, reflections, meditations, and musings.  Last night I read a few.  Here’s one from 1952 that seems compelling to me today:

How ridiculous, this need of yours to communicate!  Why should it mean so much to you that at least one person has seen the inside of your life?  Why should you write down all this, for yourself, to be sure–perhaps, though, for others as well?

I’m in the middle of revising another draft of my manuscript.  I’m walking through some thoughtful edits from Maya Rock, and the walk is both enlivening and humbling.

I’ve been sick for more than two weeks thanks to my generous son.  I’m still a little congested, in the head especially, and I mean that, at least, in two ways.  But Hammarskjold’s words come alongside me as I’m reading my edits, adding and cutting and thinking and shaking my head at some of the assumptions I make in my story.

I’m considering my draft in light of his reflection.  How he says writing, or communicating, allows a person to see the inside of your life.  How communication is for others.  It really takes me out of my head, where all the assumptions are, where all the answers are, and delivers them onto the page, into the conversation, in the space where communication happens between two people.