editing.

I have never been great at editing my own work, surprisingly, considering I work as a writer. Once the words in my head get onto the page, I have the urge to fling them off. I never want to look at them again. I want to forget that I was so bold, or foolish, as to take my thoughts and put them down for everyone to read. It’s not the most healthy feeling, and a little tricky to manage when writing seems to be your work.

Up until four or five years ago, I used to throw away everything I wrote. I would fill up notebooks, and bit by bit, I’d tear out the pages and throw them away. I blogged on and off, and usually wound up deleting the blogs shortly thereafter. The urge to write has always been there, but the courage to lay the writing bare and let others see it has not. That’s why the first rule of this blog, for my own sake, was:

I will not delete. Once I put it out there, it's out there. Yes, I am afraid that I'll sound stupid, silly or wrong. Well sometimes I am stupid, silly and wrong. I apologize now for being any of those things, but even still - I'm not going to delete it.

But I’m trying to stretch myself a bit further these days, trying to do something more than the rambling and freewriting. It is hard as hell. I keep telling myself that I will get better at it only by doing it, but its so easy to feel like it will never come out right, ever, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I have to suppress a lot of feelings in order to make myself reread and think critically about what I’m writing. Like I said, I’ve never been great at editing my own work.

That was the task in front of me today, and I’ve done an epic job of avoiding it. I made phone calls, I ran errands, I even resorted to an afternoon nap. So the day stretches into evening now, permeated by the blues because I’ve spent the entire day avoiding the thing I want to/have to/hate to do. But there’s still time left today.