I really like this! Except… maybe you should just change everything.

I feel like I’ve become an editing machine in the last few weeks.  I’ve been working in my university’s writing center as a tutor, have gone to a writer’s workshop through Sightlines, and have been work shopping poetry by both myself and others for a poetry class.  It’s as if I exist to analyze and pick apart.  It’s enough to drive even the craziest writer sane.

Anyone who’s ever worked extensively on a piece of writing will tell you that the hardest part of writing is rewriting.  It’s not the generating ideas, or even putting them together, it’s the fine-tuning them. It’s trying to make your words convey the message you’re trying to express, or stir up the emotion you’re looking to evoke. 

Editing a piece is like being in labor -at least what I imagine labor must feel like.  Those delivery scenes on TV look pretty painful…  Or maybe, a better comparison might be getting a skin graft.  That’s exactly what searching through your entire vocabulary for that right word feels like. Cutting that one line you love is still like cutting your arm off out of pure necessity.  You bleed for a little while

Of course, there’s moral support, but sometimes even that wears thin.  After the third edited draft of a poem I’m working on I accusingly pointed out to one of my best friends that she hadn’t commented on what I’d done with it.  “Oh, you mean the part where you replaced that one word, and moved an entire line to the next stanza?” she said rolling her eyes.  At that moment I wondered if she knew how irritating it was to have my entire pathetic writing career laid out in front of me like that. Yes… just that one word and that one line…. But I think they really clarify my underlying theme!

Other writers, you’d think, should be more sympathetic.  Yet, I think sometimes they’re just more eager to feel better about their own work then they are to actually support yours.   As a writer, your workshop experience might go something like this:

You read your piece.
There is a long, awkward, unavoidable but excruciatingly long pause…..

And then somebody says something to the effect of “Oh I really like the metaphor you use about brushing your teeth,” but promptly misunderstand it.  Your workshoppers start to tell you what you mean, or what you should mean, and you get defensive, trying to flesh out to them the soul of that particular image.  Then, somewhere in their well-meaning and insistent, but wrong explanations you begin to understand the right one well enough to write a doctoral thesis on it, let alone a poem.

Billy Collins says it well in his poem Workshop:

 “Maybe it’s just me,
But the next stanza is where I have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost.  I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the way the scene keeps shifting around…
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is It a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.”

Sometimes they’ll give you valuable feedback, and sometimes the things they say are only helpful because they make it clear to you what you need to make readers understand within the work.

This kind of work can be tear-your-hair-out frustrating, but, if you’re lucky, after countless hours of labor, rather than scrapping the thing altogether, you’ll have a brush with the thing that inspired it.  Something about the way the sun is shining, your hair is falling, or someone is smiling at you will just melt away all tension, inexplicably cause the creative gear in your brain to click back into place, and enable you to write again.  Insanity intact, you can finish what you started.