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!