The other day I was sitting on my couch while a pair of strangers cut into my kitchen floor. The good news is that they were supposed to be there. The wood near the fridge is rotten and dangerous, so it had to go. I don’t like having rotten floors; you never know when they are going to give out. So what do you do? You rip up the carpet, you take a big saw and you rip out the rot. In a way this is exactly what it is like to edit a manuscript.
I know that most of you have spent hours carefully crafting your stories. You just can’t bear to let go of a piece that was written with so much love and care. Most writers will carefully sculpt and build off of their rough draft. Shaving a sentence here and there. Combining a paragraph for flow. Making sure they use active voice. These types of actions can be thought of using a scalpel, shaving and molding words to fit our needs. Sometimes in spite of an author’s best intentions they produce a chapter or a character that just doesn’t work. We try to salvage it with the scalpel but it’s just not enough. This is when we need to be brave enough to bring in the hammer.
I remember when I was just starting out. Writing was a monumental undertaking (it still is) and when I came upon a chapter that didn’t work I was so afraid to just toss it out. I wrote that chapter over the course of a few hours and yet I spent weeks trying to salvage it. It just didn’t work.
I can still remember the sour taste in my mouth as my finger hung over that delete key. What if I couldn’t write this chapter? What if my best wasn’t good enough? The doubts rattled around inside my brain like marbles in a tin can, a lot of noise but not a lot of good. I hit that delete key and then moved on to another section of my manuscript. I write my stories as one very long rough draft. I had already pushed my way through my beginning, middle and end, so I had plenty of material to work with. So instead of fretting I spent my time shaping the chapters that followed my troubled section and moved on with telling my story. On my second editing pass I came back to my missing chapter and I found that I was no longer afraid. The deed had already been done. Instead of worrying, my mind focused on what needed to be done, I needed to write this chapter. I also had an added bonus of knowing a lot more about my story and characters by this point. That original chapter wouldn’t have worked at all. Instead I had the opportunity to write something brand new.
The artist’s journey is full of stories like this. We are constantly called to be both a loving creator with our work while we also remain our toughest critic. As we shape and mold each chapter and paragraph we leave a little bit of ourselves on the pages. It is hard to let go, but sometimes it is what the story needs. The goal of a story is to be told. That paragraph or chapter can wait, especially if the rest of the story remain untold. If you find yourself spending to much time trying to salvage something and it’s just not getting there, don’t be afraid to start over. Sometimes that is the best thing you can do. Once that obstacle is out of the way then you can focus on the real goal, telling your story the best way you know how.