Sophie takes inspiration from a surprise essay in her In Box and as a result hooks up again with a much loved literary hero

Editing your own work is a bit of a mixed blessing. I’ve been thinking that maybe, this time, I’ve been at the current book too hard for too long.

And this week a salutary article by wonderful Emma Darwin popped up in my In Box, which has made me step back and take stock. She calls it Wonky Ducks and Ugly Ducklings. It was exactly what I needed.

Pleasures and PItfalls of Editing Your Own

I used to know an actor who said he knew his time was up when he enjoyed rehearsing more than being on stage in front of an audience. For a while that was me and editing.

For one thing, it gives me the chance to cut all the stuff where I went off piste. (I’m a great one for tangents, I’m afraid. Even in conversation.)

And it’s great for picking up the typos  — and even the odd Malapropism.Though, I admit, in the latest bunch, none was as good as when a secretary at the day job, typing one of my dictated notes, replaced “treatment of accrued interest” with “Treating A Crude Interest.” Caused quite a stir.

And, of course, editing  your own stuff is a terrific justification for postponing indefinitely the submission of the ms to Other Eyes.

But the big problem of self-editing is that you come face to face with all sorts of things that you were never quite sure about in the first place.

And then there’s the phrase, the critical moment, even a whole slug of plot in which you have now lost confidence.

For a while, I loved editing. It seemed more manageable, somewhow,  than wrestling the first draft out of my hoppitty brain. No longer.

Now – well, there was a moment this week when my current Absolutely Final Edit turned into a nightmare of trying to double-guess every damn thing I’d already written. Over years.

I’m back from that now, with a lot of help from my friends and then a big shove of memory jogging from Emma’s Ducks. But for a while it was a damn close thing.

Mist or Mire

photographee-eu – stock.adobe.com

The Darwin contribution was, first of all, her own Note to Self which she had come across by accident and set her thinking. It rang every single one of the Bow Bells for me. “Learning, as a writer, to get out of your own way/light.”

In the heat of writing, I am impetuous, careless, fast. I know something about my characters and their world, not all. I know there is a hinterland and bends in the road to come. But I don’t see them clearly until they become important to the story. And then they flow out of me onto the page, without much planning and no thought of consistency or any other auditoral concern at all. It is, truly, flying into the mist.

But when it comes to editing, it’s quite different. Editing demands careful checking and correcting; weighing up the issues; thinking about POV, story structure, tension… It can — NO, it has  — whisked me out of the mist and dumped me well and truly in the mire. I am SO getting in my own way now.

But there may be a solution. In her essay, Emma also quotes from Ray Bradbury’s collection of essays, Zen in the Art of Writing.

I hadn’t read them for ages. But I used to love them. They are wildly personal and always made me feel at home, somehow. He was an associative, rather than a logical thinker, and he constantly mined his own experiences, including those he had recorded sublimnally, like found sound.

Ray Bradbury

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

When I first discovered these essays, it seemed to me that he must have written rather like I did, very fast, and not wholly in control. In his piece on Fahrenheit 451 — including the sequel he had decided not to write — he said “I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion.”

But it was another essay, The Secret Mind, which came closer to what I used to feel most of the time and now need to get back. He starts it with an account of his (reluctant) time in Ireland with John Huston who invited him to come and write the screenplay for Moby DIck.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

“I thought that I saw nothing, heard nothing of Ireland,” he writes at the start of the piece. But then, “the sublimnal eye is shrewd… my interior self kept alert, snuffed deep, listened long, watched close, and filed Ireland and its people for other times.”

He concludes,”in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed, when I thought I was sitting this one out.

“We never sit anything out.

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

“The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

CONCLUSION

Image by poedynchuk from Pixabay

In the eponymous essay of the collection, Bradbury proposes a three-stage approach to writing. I think it will work equally well for the absolutely final edit on which I am currently engaged. Essentially his principle seems to be Trust Your Instincts, your Sub-Conscious will fill in the blanks. He sums it up thus:

WORK

RELAXATION

DON’T THINK

I think it should be fun. Wish me luck!

Sophie