A newly published author with her first book out said it took her no less than twelve years, the majority of that time spent rewriting her singular story. I swoon at the thought. Twelve damnable years!
At a snail’s pace I plod along, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. Last night I’d had enough. I went back to my rough and my submission and then to my current draft and tried to compare, tried to see where the changes were made–do they even matter?
It’s hard to even find matching sections on which to make a comparison. The rough is a rough. It’s the telling of a story. The draft is the showing of a story. So I compared drafts. The prose is different, but more than that–what I see now is a weaving of inner and outer reflection. There is description, but not for the sake of describing–that is why I left it out in the first place. No, this is not the same somehow.
Meanwhile, as I write circles around myself in the mud, the story ever grows. The more concrete and grounded the prose, the deeper and wider the storyline fills in, fleshes out–far into the future, that which I haven’t gotten to yet in the draft. Mere chapters away, but an eternity of time in rewriting land.
I hate it. It mocks me. I take my little broken spoon, filling up a glass jar with shifting sand. I’ll never be able to capture it. I look back at my footsteps in the desert and have no sense of where I’ve been. Am I coming, am I going, am I lost in circle? So much is a mirage. I worked hard on my submission draft, truly, I did. Only six weeks later I look back and shake my head in despair. Despair. I honestly didn’t understand what they told me in critique.
I fully understand it now. Rejoice that I understand? No, I feel childish in my lacking ability to perceive things in the broad open light of day. I’ve already written the length of that submission probably more than once, in my subsequent false starts. 10,000 words is next to nothing in my world these days.
I can’t explain this right, I know. Countless times while learning to draw and paint, instructors have picked up my brush or charcoal and with a few lines or strokes, corrected something right before my eyes that I never even saw. And gratefully I went on.
So I did in this case too. I took the advice, I worked hard to correct, to re-envision, feeling but not seeing my way through this horrible thing we call story craft. Looking back, my blindness hurts me.
Beginner’s mind is beautiful, precious thing. Bold and unafraid, a beginner will push forward happy taking joy in the simple act of doing– a loving protection of sorts. Utter blindness.
It’s official though. My blushing shame, my cringing feeling at reading where I have been, knowing how well pleased with myself that I was to have even finished—no, I am now a journeyman. I am able to see at least some of my own flaws–and fear the ones I can’t.
It’s a sign of true growth, but a dangerous time as well. The fragile ego wrestles for control, in hopes of managing the risk to itself. Suddenly, only perfection will do–when the truth is, perfection at this stage is just not possible. You have to be willing to risk. Risk a broken heart to gain greater prize than self preservation has the ability to grant. Let fear win in this stage and you’ll forever be held in the grasp of never having true confidence. It’s the most difficult stage of artistic development, a painful way to live because you’ve grown the wings, earned your birthright to the sky, but are afraid to use them for fear of falling. God, it hurts to fail.
