It's OK If Your Writing Is Crap

I've been a writer for a long time (more than 12 years actually), and I learned an important lesson today. And that is that if you look at something for too long, or too many times, eventually your eyes start to glaze over and you can't tell left from right or up from down. And then...well then you start fixing things that don't need to be fixed.

I've experienced this phenomenon in the past when I've worked on tough copywriting assignments, but in a slightly different way. On occasion I've worked on something for so long that I got to a point where I wanted to literally wring my own neck, poke my eyes out, and squirm out of my chair. Because I couldn't look at the words for one second longer.

In those situations I send it off for a new set of eyes and then jump from my chair, slam down the computer screen, and go do something else for a while.

But working on a book is so different. For one, it's way longer. So trying to read the work from beginning to end just doesn't happen in one sitting or in one day. This inherently makes the editing process much harder when you're looking at overall cohesiveness.

Until this week, in all of my copywriting days, I've never edited something so much that I started changing things back to the way they were before, or fixing things that maybe didn't need fixing, or started thinking the entire work was crap. When this began happening and then continued for two days in a row, I finally emailed my editor. She told me to close the file and send it to her. So I did.

I've often read about how writers will start to edit their work to death, nit-picking it apart until they've completely edited out the essence of what it was. And I didn't think that I'd do that sort of thing. I mean, I thought I'd be way more aware of my editing activities so that I could successfully avoid that pit. And then I found myself in it.

I'm glad she yanked me out.

So now? Now I sit and wait for her to read through my book and tell me if it's total crap, sorta crap, half crap, not too bad, promising, or pretty good. And I think under normal circumstances (or perhaps if I were still in my twenties) I'd be on pins and needles about this, biting my nails and compulsively hitting refresh in my email application. But I'm proud to say that I have a healthy detachment right now. Because I'm thinking:

• If it's mostly crap, I'll just rewrite the parts that are crap until it's not crap.
• If it's sorta crappy, then I'll have less to fix in order to get something that's not crap.
• If it's promising, then I'll be almost to the finish line and can rework the minor crap.
• If it's good, then I'll be satisfied that I don't have to do any additional work and can get it out the door.

The point to remember is that even if something is crap, it's not the end of the world. Eventually the finish line will be the same if you keep working at it: it'll get out the door. The whole "is it crap or isn't it crap" is more of a timeline, really. Because the first draft is certainly crap, isn't it?

"But wait," you say, "what about all those stories I abandoned years ago? Aren't they crap?"

Well, yes, they are. But they wouldn't be if you kept working on them. You stopped at the "this is still crap" point in the timeline. You could keep going if you wanted to.

Know what I mean, Vern?
(I'm channeling my inner Ernest P. Worrell.)

When You Finish Your Second Edit Of Your Book/Novel

So today was another achievement in my path to publication: I finished the second full edit of my manuscript. So what's a girl to do now? I mean am I done? Is it ready? Is it a masterpiece now?

No way!

What a girl's to do now is send it back to Fedex Office (which I did), have it printed out for the third time (yep), and begin round three of edits (tomorrow).

I hear so many people say that they want to write a book. But I think most of them don't realize the agony that is the writing process. Ok, I'm being a little dramatic, but it really is long and arduous and brain-breaking. Oh and yes, fun too. But the fun comes in between all that other stuff.

If you can somehow upchuck enough words to create a manuscript large enough to be called a book, you're one step ahead of most people. I'm happy that I'm finally in the "one step ahead of most people" category after two failed attempts over the past 8-9 years.

Now if you've gotten to where I am and are staring down at your edited piece of work, the question becomes this: Can you spend months or years editing your book so that it becomes something worthwhile? Can you hang? Can you keep on keepin' on? Can you slash and burn (text) when necessary?

I will say that I was surprised at the amount of editing my second iteration required. I thought it was closer. I thought the first round caught most of it.

Nope.

And this is exactly why you need multiple rounds, because it's never as good as you think it is. Not when you come back with fresh eyes. And I think that's the key - fresh eyes. And that's why you can't just rely on your own eyeballs to make an ultimate decision about how "good" your book is. Because by the time you get to round two and three and beyond, you're too close to it. You can't see the broken parts anymore. Heck, you can't see the awesome parts anymore either!

So I'll start my third round of edits tomorrow. I've printed out my book double-sided this time so that it'll read more like a book. It's bound nicely with coils and is currently sitting on my coffee table.

I've got about a week and a half to get through it with my red pen to meet my latest deadline with my editor. And then? I'll cross my fingers and hold on, and see if there's another round.

Cure For Writer's Block? Major Illness!

I've been sick for the last seven weeks, I've had two surgeries, and I've often found myself huddled in a black corner of my mind crying tears into a brown wooden bucket. It has sucked. But during that time something interesting happened: I found a cure for my writer's block.

Now I wouldn't recommend this cure for everyone. Because who wants to be sliced open multiple times, not be able to eat, not be able to move, and otherwise not be able to live any semblance of a normal life? But I think there are some lessons to be learned from the experience.

When you're going through a major illness and, as I so eloquently stated last week, you feel like you've "been hacked apart with an axe and stapled back together," you start to have some interesting conversations with yourself. They go something like this:

• "What if I don't get better?"
• "What if I don't live as long as I thought I would? What if I don't get as far as I thought I'd get?"
• "How could I be going along just fine and suddenly find myself bedridden and unable to live my life?"
• "Why am I so chicken shit about my writing? Or about anything, for that matter?"
• "I need to stop wasting time. I have wasted too much time."
• "Am I living the life I want to live? I'm close, but is close good enough?"

This is sort of what happened to me. It finally sunk in that I'm not in control of my existence on planet earth - I could be yanked out of it whenever the puppeteer decides my act is over. But what I can control is my performance while I'm here. What I can control is how much I let fear dictate my actions. And what I can control is what I decide to do with my time.

I wrote a lot in my twenties about how I felt like I had "stuff" (books, writing, whatever) inside of me, but that everything was stuck behind a three foot thick cement wall. I'd felt some cracks over the last 10 years - I mean I did finally finish a draft of a book - but nothing had truly shifted. I still didn't see myself able to formulate anything fictional that was worth reading.

But when I got so sick, that big cement wall fell through the floor. For the first time in my life I got out of my own way. Because it turns out, the cement wall is me. My mind. My fears. And I was just too tired and beaten down to be able to think or fear or...get in my own way.

In the middle of the night one night, about three weeks after my first surgery, I came up with a new character. I typed out the opening prose in the Notepad app on my iPhone, in the pitch black of my bedroom at 3:30 in the morning. When I read it the next day I was pretty happy with it. And excited. Because she felt real. She was interesting. She was going to have a story to tell, although I still don't know what that story is yet. But I can't wait to try to tell it.

As I continue to try to heal and get back to normal, I'm thankful for my new perspective on life. I don't want to spend energy criticizing myself, fearing things that may or may not happen, and stifling my writing ability. I know now that I don't have time to waste. And yes, we are all aware of this most of the time. But we really don't take it seriously until something serious happens. You know?

I'm Still Editing, But I'm Ready to Write!

Editing is a whole different ballgame than writing. Yes, it's technically the same thing - you write when you edit because you move stuff around, delete words, craft new sentences, etc. But editing comes from a totally different mindset than your initial draft.

When you're writing the initial draft your creativity is driving the train. You get to lose yourself in your mind, your words, your world. Which is not to say that you don't do this when you edit, too. But editing means writing while examining a world you already created, looking at it from a place that is separate.

When you are editing you act more like a critical reader than a writer. And when the copy still needs work, this process gets tiring after a while! So you put it down and go read a book that has already been edited, just so that you can rest your brain.

Now this predicament I'm in (being tired of editing) is really my own fault. I've let the editing process drag out for months because I just didn't have the mental energy to plow through it after a day of freelance work. I do think that if I was writing books for a living, I could maul that manuscript in about a month. But let's step back from that disturbing imagery (yeah, I'm tired of editing, I'm picturing a pit bull) and into reality.

The reality is that I'm on page 197 out of 287, and the last 10 pages or so have yet to be transcribed into the computer. And some of those pages need some rework, so I'm still about 100 pages out. And my due date is December 15.

But I have to have another surgery in eight days. And I'm still recovering from the first surgery. And my gallbladder is shot, which means parts of my day are shot from time to time because of pain. Oh, and did I mention I got a cold that lasted for 10 days and now I'm on antibiotics?

So it's sort of my fault, but then sort of not. I do have to eat and I do have to pay these atrocious medical bills, and that means that I have to focus on freelance writing most of the time. But I still strive to do more and to make more progress in my "aspiring author" endeavors.

I'm learning something really important about my writing self, too. I'm learning that dragging out the editing process makes me impatient. It makes me ready to get it done with and ready to move on to the next project. Which really isn't surprising because I get this way with my freelance work as I'm nearing completion.

I started reading a writing book today called "Bird by Bird," which talks about how so many aspiring authors focus on the publishing part of things. "I just want to get published!" "If I get published, I'll feel awesome and so accomplished!" But, she says, really the publishing part is not where the goods are. It won't bring you the fuzzy feelings you think it will bring you. Instead, she says, the writing process is where you get those feelings you are searching for.

As I was slugging and slashing through text tonight, I thought to myself, "I totally see this. I get it. She's so right." Because while I'm extremely excited to publish my work and to hopefully make some money, and of course my biggest dream is to be successful in my personal writing endeavors, I'm more excited about moving on to my next book.

That means writing again. Getting back into that immersion thing. Seeing where my imagination or my fingertips might take me next.

So yes, I could be transferring manuscript edits to my computer right now. But instead I came here to write a blog because I just needed to be in a world of creation again. I needed to immerse myself in my head and see what comes out. I'm so ready to write!

But I do need to finish my editing first.

One Edit Is Not Enough

Today I reached a milestone: I finished my first full edit/rewrite of my book. The words that I might use to describe this moment are:

• gleeful
• exciting
• satisfying
• happy
• proud
• giddy

I also sorta think I'm a total badass. But I think anyone who finishes their first full edit of a 67,500 page book might feel like quite the badass. The only thing that made me feel like more of a badass was when I finished the first draft.

So I've ridden the wave of that feeling for the entire afternoon. I'm still feeling giddy and happy and all those other words I mentioned above. But I'm also aware that I still have a long way to go.

I think a big mistake a lot of writers make is believing that one edit is enough. Unless you're doing stream of consciousness writing with the goal of vomiting on the page without regard to readability, everything you write needs to be edited - and everything needs to be edited more than once.

I like to think of the first round of edits as the "glaring problems cleanup round." When you do your first edit, you catch stuff like:

• Totally incoherent sentences
• Grammatical oopsies
• Glaring flow problems
• Big story/plot inconsistencies
• Readability problems
• Pacing problems

The first edit is, I think, the most work. Because you're taking what may have been stream of consciousness writing and making it into something that makes sense and is worth reading.

So pat yourself on the back when you get through your first edit. But don't consider your work ready to publish.

I think most writing needs at least two or three rounds of edits to be worth reading, and I think four or five rounds is even better. Everything I write (including these blog posts) goes through no less than three rounds of edits before it's released to the world. I shudder to think about my first drafts. Sometimes they're awesome, but more often they're lacking in multiple ways. And you won't spot them all on the first round.

So to all my fellow writers out there, resist the temptation to say "I'm finished!" when you've completed your first round of edits. Give it at least one more round, or two, before you call it ready. And then...well, it's still not done. Then it goes to a professional editor. ;)

On Again, Off Again Passions

I'm wondering today if you can have a passion that is on again, off again. You know, like one of those unhealthy romantic things that most of us find ourselves tangled up in at some point. Except that this on again, off again relationship lasts a lifetime.

I feel like my writing is sort of a flighty, wishy washy, unpredictable sort of passion. But then it really isn't I guess. I'm a writer by profession. I wonder if I wasn't a writer by profession, would I be a passionate writer by night? Like, totally committed? Ten thousand percent? Can't get enough of it?

I often tell myself in my frustrated moments that you can only be passionate about something that you are completely obsessed with. But then I think, that's probably not true or realistic.

What I really think, I think (you get that?), is that there are three kinds of people in the world:

• The people who are completely engrossed by a single passion in both their career and in their personal lives
• The people who are completely engrossed by a single passion in their spare time
• The people who have on again, off again relationships with a single passion or perhaps multiple ones

There are a number of prolific writers out there. I think if I had enough to say, I'd certainly be one. I mean I've pumped out several of these blogs this week no problem. They generally take me less than 10 minutes to write when I've actually got something I want to say.

But I also see writers, and artists, who come in and out of the spotlight. Who go years or decades in between producing something new.

Maybe I'm one of those?

Or maybe I'm trying to make sense out of something that doesn't make any sense, just to make myself feel better about being a wishy washy sort of writer. One who has bursts of creativity followed by a long silence that gets covered up by books and tv and gardening.

I don't know. What do you think?

Finding the Right Kind of Busy

I've had some interesting things to say this week about my busy schedule. And I'll continue it with the following statement:

Being too busy kills dreams.

That might sound a bit harsh, but the reality is that if you want to achieve your dreams, you've got to figure out how to be the right kind of busy.

I'll take one sentence and give you a bunch of fill-in-the-blank answers. All of these answers are dream killers. Here it is:

Spending too much time _______ will keep you from achieving your dreams.

• chasing money
• working
• watching TV
• scrolling Facebook
• sleeping
• doing things you don't enjoy

Society as a whole is way too busy - we all know that. But not everyone is busy to the detriment of their dreams.

What are you doing with your time? Is what you are doing a stepping stone to your goals or is it a hamster wheel?

Here are the questions I've been asking myself lately, and maybe you can ask yourself these questions too:

• Am I too focused on making money?
• Do I work too many hours at my job?
• Am I making time to pursue the things I dream of pursuing?
• Do I have plans for where I'm going next?
• Am I using my free time well?
• Do I have any bad habits that are keeping me from progressing towards my dreams?

I'd be interested to hear how others answer these questions. Here are my answers:

• Yes. I initially was focused on earning money for future goals, and somewhere along the line it shifted to just earning money.
• Yes. I'm working too many hours at my job.
• Sort of. But sort of not.
• I used-ta-did. I abandoned said plans due to crazy work schedule.
• No. I'm working myself to the point of exhaustion.
• Yes. I need to work on my confidence, get up earlier, and stop scrolling social media.

The first step to positive change is figuring out where you're at in your life. The next step is figuring out how to move to where you want to go.

First step, check!

Having Confidence as a Writer

Today is one of those "I can't focus at all, I mean at all, I mean totally at all (continue this to infinity)" kind of days. And there are multiple reasons for this:

1. I didn't sleep last night. Brains don't work very well without sleep, do they?
2. It's a Monday. Need I say more?
3. I'm reevaluating. And by that I mean reevaluating how I'm spending my time. 
4. I live with cats. They are oh so cute, and I love to snuggle them at random times throughout the day.
5. It's First Monday and I'm excited. The first Monday of the month I meet my friend Bill for dinner, and we have a grande ole time.

I haven't touched my book manuscript in months, and I waffle around why that is. I think, as I touched on in my last post, I've just been busy busy busy. And when you're busy busy busy, it's hard to write write write. Well, let me amend this statement.

It's hard to write if you're not obsessed with writing. And I'm not obsessed with writing. I love it, but I'm not obsessed with it. At least not all the time.

For me, writing is more like an on-again, off-again relationship. I write in spurts, I produce stuff in waves. I experience fleeting moments of brilliance that quickly flit away into the atmosphere from which they came. See that? That was one. I think. Right? Surely!

But I do sometimes wonder how much of this behavior is attributed to a deep down lack of confidence.

Every artist struggles with feeling like they are good enough. I've written about it before, and I'm sure if you want to scroll through my posts you'll find it quickly enough. But artists (and I hesitate to even call myself one - how's that for lack of confidence?) always want to produce something great. Nobody wants to be a mediocre artist, do they? I mean, does anyone really want to be a mediocre anything at the end of the day?

And with that comes fear of failure, and fear of mediocrity, and fear of just not measuring up. Or of just not being that artist you thought you were or that you set out to be.

Then all of a sudden I'll be thumbing through a magazine and see a promotion for a recently published book. And it's a book with a story that sounds, to me, absolutely cliche or terribly laughable or painfully unrealistic. And yet...wait for it...

Somebody published it.

So um, why can't I do that? Why do I spend so much of my precious energy fearing failure and worrying about being good enough when - clearly - there are plenty of people who are "good enough" to get published? And why do I think this way when I'm a professional writer by day, and perhaps actually have a good shot at producing something good?

These are my Monday musings as I pitter patter around my house, and as I look at my author website (which needs to be redone - oh, technology, you imploded on yourself). And as I look at my workload, which needs to be better managed so I can have time for the things that matter to me.

And let's not forget that little manuscript file here on my computer that is screaming at me. You know what it's saying? "Work on me, you stupid human. I've been sitting here for months."

I'm Itching, Itching!

I have about 10 minutes to write this in between client work. Because a computer program decided to break (this is what they do best, right?). Huzzah for a breather!

So let's get to the point. I'm itching, y'all. Itching! I was trying to see if ITCHING would go along with the Mickey Mouse song so we could all sing it out loud together. But it won't, so I'll move on. I'm itching to write again.

The trouble is that I've been struggling to find the brainpower to write anything at all after working such long hours. Ok, *cough*, let's be honest...I haven't written anything in a long while. It looks like my last blog post in here was in March of this year.

Eek!

I think I'm the type of writer who needs breaks sometimes. And occasionally, very long breaks (months). But then I come back and I'm ready to go. Ready to pump out words. Ready to make it flow.

And right now I'm itching so much that I'm taking a measly 10 minutes to drum my keys frantically and write about how much I'm itching to write.

Ok so we're at about the two minute mark. That leaves me about three more minutes to say anything else I want to say before I need to spend the last five minutes editing.

Here are my other random thoughts:

• The title of my book needs to change. I don't know what it's going to be yet, but it's going to change. It ain't workin' for me anymore.
• The new medication I have to take makes my brain mush sometimes. It's hard to find the right words on occasion when I talk. I'm hoping this doesn't translate to my writing. That would be a tragedy. Although I think I shall survive.
• My freelance business is exceptionally successful, although I'm probably spending less than 50% of my time writing these days. Which is good and bad. Good because writing is exhausting. Bad because either way, I'm tired.

So there you have it. I think I have satisfied my itch for now.

But only for now.

Stay tuned, because I'm going to make a spectacular comeback, an exceptional return, an awesome re-entry! Ok, that's a bit of a hyperbole. I'll be back...soon...I hope. :)

Now, time to edit.

Writing Is...Exhausting

Hello, I'm a writer! And I'm exhausted. How are you?

Writing is a really tiring pursuit. After spending almost two years now writing full-time (not that I didn't write in corporate, but I didn't always have writing work depending on the day or the job), I can officially say that I'm exhausted.

Now this isn't really a rant. It's more of an acknowledgement, you know? Or maybe a recognition of something I'm discovering about myself. A recognition that I got so tired that I made myself sick and I'm still recovering two weeks later. A recognition that I've got some good things going, and that I need to find more balance, too.

I'm really glad that I've got a batch of clients who understand how tough it is to write well, and who pay me appropriately. But I'm also glad that my main client gives me non-writing tasks to do so that my brain can breathe a little bit.

You know how when you have to think really hard about something for a long time, and then at some point your brain starts fogging up, and then you want to go zone out in front of the TV for like six hours? That's sort of how I feel every day. 

The process of learning about a product or service, learning what the client wants, learning what their client wants (if I'm working with an agency), learning about the industry and target audience, and then churning it all into something readable is like running a marathon sometimes.

And I don't want to whine about my job. I love my job. I'm just recognizing that trying to write all day every day for the next 30+ years may not be sustainable. Because my brain is going to slow down over time. And my energy will, too.

Which is why I'm really excited that I've found some other ways to make money, so that I can diversify it up a bit. Will I always write? Absolutely. Writing is just what I do. And it's what I will always do.

But will I always write full-time? No. I don't think so. I'll be throwing some yoga and photography into the mix as much as I can afford to. And probably hanging on to my really awesome main client for dear life. ;)

Abandoning the Book

I always thought that to be a "real" writer you had to write books. Like the ultimate end goal was to produce something bound together in paper, with a defined story arc, of a significant length that could be revered or hated.

And so of course as a writer I've tried to write books. Three times, to be exact. And I do think I will finally finish the one I'm working on at some point. But beyond that, the truth is that I honestly don't know if I can write books. Or if I want to write books.

In fact, I don't think that I do. Which still bemoans me to admit.

Today I was lying on the couch curled up in a ball, with my throat hurting from a bacterial infection and my stomach hurting from the antibiotic I had taken. And of course it's in these unthinking kinds of moments that the "stuff" hiding in our minds comes to the forefront.

My next book had already been formed in my head for a few months and I was pretty excited about it. But this afternoon I realized I was choosing the wrong medium. A book? No. I wanted to write a book because I wanted to be a writer. But really, I just want to write. And I don't think I want to write a book about this.

And so I picked up my cell phone without really moving from the fetal position, and I went to my favorite domain website (GoDaddy) and purchased a domain. And now the title of my next book is the title of a new website that I own.

www.WeAreYogis.com

I'm not sure where this is going to take me yet - maybe nowhere, to be honest. Because on any given day I have a number of fleeting ideas that come through my brain. But the fact that my latest book idea isn't a book anymore is actually OK with me.

Because you know what I'm realizing? That I don't have to be like everyone else. That I don't have to conform to any standard set by society or by history or by any other arbitrary entity. That I am a writer just by writing, anywhere and in any format. And that is enough.

Writing Fatigue

Admittedly, it's been over a month since I posted on this blog. And as I squint my eyes and fight the blurriness that keeps sneaking up on me, I want to write this post because I miss it. Because I've been totally consumed by freelance work since about late October.

I'm experiencing writing fatigue.

I think writing fatigue is different than exhaustion. When you're fatigued, you're tired. You want to rest a lot. But at the end of it all you still get up and go and do what you have to do, and you somehow manage to get stuff done. Whereas when you're exhausted, everything shuts down and all you want to do is sleep or stare at the wall.

I do experience writing exhaustion on and off, yes. Sometimes it's at certain times of day, sometimes it's on the weekends when I'm coming off of a crazy work week. But the exhaustion fades away and the fatigue takes its place. And then sometimes a flurry of excitement and energy bumbles in and I'm on fire for a few hours.

And then I'm back to writing fatigue.

But really I'm ok with it right now. No, I can't work on my book manuscript. No, I don't have much mental energy left to work on my blogs. Especially when I've now taken up photography and have started teaching yoga again. But I know it'll come.

There is a season for everything in life. And my current season is a freelance season. It's a making money season, so that we can be comfortable moving into the years ahead. It's an establishing myself and my career season. It's a season that will pass, that will become a new one over the natural course of time.

So I'm embracing it. And writing up this little post, too. And now my writing exhaustion is taking back over, so off I go. Until my next break, or until a new season begins.