I love writing. I
do. Love the creation of something that
has never existed in the world before, love the way dialogue plays in my head,
love the sound the keys make as I transcribe it to the page. But today I have a confession to make: as
much as I love writing, I hate rewriting. Even now, I’m about ready to chuck my computer
into the washing machine and set it on spin if my husband gives me one more
note to make this opening paragraph “punchier.”
There. Punchy enough? I know, I know, don’t blame the
messenger. And the truth is, like the
famous quote points out, writing is
rewriting. But the necessity of it
doesn’t make it any easier. It is
difficult, tedious and sometimes painful work.
It hurts to whittle away words that hard work have wrought – to “kill
your darlings” as Falkner once quipped.
Hard to look at your own work with a critical eye (or to stop being so
critical in some cases.) It is difficult
to cut away lines you love, characters you have grown to adore and scenes you
are proud of, simply because they aren’t moving the story forward. And the most painful part of the process for
me is facing the fact that I will never be perfect the first time around. Or the second. Or even the fifteenth. In fact, perfection as a writer is completely
unattainable…but a great story is not.
And that is what rewriting will win you.
Just like Michelangelo chipping away at the stone to discover his David,
or a master jeweler cutting away parts of a diamond to find the maximum shine –
brilliance is in the editing. And the
interesting thing is: the same can be said for life.
The author John Irving famously said, “Half my life is an
act of revision.” I would take it a step
further and say that all of life
is. Have you ever noticed the clarity
that comes from cutting out the things in your life that are keeping your story
from moving forward? That’s because
things like guilt and resentment and unrealistic expectations only serve to
distract from the important things in life, the central plot, if you will. Grudges, anger and fear can bog down a life
and make it as ineffectual just as an extra twenty pages in the middle of a
second act can ruin a good screenplay. I know it is not an easy process to
evaluate the things in your script that are holding you back from greatness –
and harder still to make the actual cut once you’ve narrowed in on the
problem. Personally I will often try
everything I can to keep a scene that I’ve written in my script, even when it
isn’t working, because of the fear that I won’t be able to come up with
something better. It feels safer to
stick with what you know and to try to force it to work because the unknown
makes us vulnerable. And the impulse
that compels a writer to keep clunky scenes and expositional dialogue in her
work is the same thing that makes us hold onto bad relationships and stay in
unfulfilling jobs that are keeping us from reaching our full potential –
mainly, we are afraid there might not be anything better out there.
Plain and simple, revision is an act of faith – it requires
that you hit the delete key before you can write something new in its
place. And sometimes in life you have to
take a leap of faith to chip away those familiar pieces of stone, whose heavy
rigidness you have mistaken for stability, in order to find the masterpiece
that lies just beneath. And trust me,
while you might hate the process, if you push through the tough changes and
don’t throw the computer in the washing machine, you will end up with something
you love and can’t wait to share with the world.
I challenge you this week to use an editor’s eye to take a
look at the story you want to tell with your life. Is there something you’ve been doing or
thinking that just doesn’t seem to serve that story? Is there a person or thing keeping the plot
from moving forward? If so, maybe it’s
time to hit the delete key and make room for something new…
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