Editing as dedication to unknowing
The leaves fall but the sun makes its way
My house is surrounded by trees and in the summer this provides a sheltered cocoon. While I am pretty close to the road I am up on the hill and I can’t see Don or Terry’s houses across the street or Mike and Paula unless I’m in the meadow. I can’t see the horse farm and the white fence or the horses in their little jackets. I love this little pocket of being hidden, watching the rose bush come to life all by myself, tending to the cosmos, greeting the turkey family as they come through to perch in the trees.
As the light gets shorter the light gets brighter. The leaves fall and I am left with glimmers of the sky, the white fence at the horse farm peeks through, and the hills to the west look like tiny mountains on the other side of the clothesline. My house is as bright as it ever is as the first days of winter arrive, and the sunset and sunrise showoff even on the cloudy days.
My 5:30am wakeup call has alluded me even with my multiple alarms. I fall asleep around 9:30 or 10pm but when it comes time to crawl out it’s not as easy as it was a few weeks ago. I make excuses in my dreams and when the sun starts to slip into the room I am startled awake, ready to make my coffee and feed June.
The greatest assignment is to be nice to myself in these moments, to celebrate this simple fact that I am indeed alive, let alone filled with even a small desire to sit down and tend to the words on the page.
I find that to write is quite easy for me, words have always flown out of my finger tips at maximum speed and creative marvel. To revise, to edit, to go back through, to take the things and rearrange them is a skill I have built slowly over time, one that takes time and patience and prayer. At the same time I despise it, I want the first draft to be the last draft, and so I slowly learn how to luxuriate in the editing process and see it as its own divine task rather than one of upheaval and clunky optimism. I am slowly starting to view it as being devoted to what I don’t know, the great unknowing.
I present to you a good reads review of my book Getting to Center
It’s true. I meander. I am a meanderer. I start in one place and then I go so many other places. This reviewer tells no lies, even in their harshness. I think yes, the book is poorly edited. Yes my sentences are fragmented. Yes I could find stronger language. But then it wouldn’t be the chaotic channeled book that it is.
I share these sorts of notes with my students to remind them to keep writing. That people will hate what you make and say and do but no matter what we keep writing, we keep making art.
My book proposal is at the place where the edits are in from my agent and now it’s time to go back through and integrate her notes. I am hungry for it again. After enough wasted snoozes on the alarm clock I become annoyed with myself enough that tomorrow I trust that I will wake up and hop up at 5:30 to greet the day and the pages. To sit down and trust my editing and revision skills, which can still be a connected channel to god even if it’s less flowing and more stopping and starting.
I asked my agent to be my agent because I knew she was going to push this part of me, the editing part. I knew she would help take my diaristic swirls and usher them into true book form, ready for public consumption. This scares me, it scares me to move something through to the next stage. Each phase becomes closer to the reality of completion where something could either fail or do well. We also get to have things be something in between, or they can fail for one reader (see above) or succeed for another (see below)
Just as the light changes so does my creative fortitude. My ability to wake up early, stay steady and focused. The seasons change in the yard and they change in my body every day. No day is like the day before or the day after, something different and new is needed for each moment.
It is within the great mystery that I continue on in my hours of editing, embracing it as a form of trust rather than fighting to try to find the answers. I’m picking the tiles for my bathroom, open to love in all its forms, and staying true to the work and to my boundaries. As the cocoon around my house drifts away and the world comes in I have to remember the importance of tuning the world out, staying steadfast in my routines and desires.
My hope is that the editing process becomes luxurious, delightful, something I can lay back in and stretch my legs out over. Nothing to be scared of, a place that my ideas can sharpen. I will let editing be a place that says - I can actually be better, this isn’t enough and thats ok. Being impeccable with my word takes more than one draft.
May you let the light in
May your first draft be shit
May your second draft be yours
May each stage of creation bring you closer to yourself
May the self you become closer to be devoted to the mystery
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"I meander. I am a meanderer" Me too. I love you 🤍
Clunky optimism :)
One thing I have noticed in myself with sharing my writing is that, in the beginning I stayed with pieces for so long that I would get cold feet about sharing them. Then, I got braver, and I started to rush through the original idea to get to the pleasure of "doneness" rather than staying with a piece or an idea long enough to let it bloom open. Like chasing the dopamine of completion- and then I'd wallow for days because I didn't quite say it the way it deserved to be said (writing can feel so painful!) I think there's a real joy and sincerity that comes through the meandering too, though. It is its own kind of style. I'm trying to take more time with my writing projects, or at least with my longer form writing projects, to chew on them and decide if the choppiness is what it is meant to be, or if it deserves to be nurtured into something else. Thanks for reminding us to luxuriate in the edits.