I write my weekly blogs as a way to hone my writing skills, but I rarely write about the process of writing. I think about it though, and recently a particular question has been gnawing at me. For the past month, I have been editing material I’d written over a year ago, I am finding myself asking the same question over and over again. It might be helpful to to put that question down on paper.
It is this: if writing as good as it can be is not the same thing as writing as good as I can make it, how do I know when to stop? Stated another way, is there a point where I have to admit to myself that a particular piece of writing, while obviously imperfect, is as good as I can make it?
I enjoy the editing, especially when enough time has passed that I feel like I am reading someone else’s manuscript. Then I get to wonder why I said what I’d said in the awkward way I said it, and I find it easy to make incremental improvements. Making something I’ve written better is satisfying. If, however, I took this editing approach too far, twenty years could pass before I’d submit anything for publication. I’d revise a manuscript up to a dozen times, and I’d wait two years between revisions. Only then would I conclude that a piece was done. If I’d started doing this when I was twenty years old, and if I’d only written content that was not time sensitive, and if I’d worked in a profession that didn’t have “publish or perish” as a mantra, this would not have been a harebrained way to go.
At times I over-edit. I can revise a piece until I suck the life out of it. My writing voice is naturally flawed, but those flaws give my writing its character. My vocabulary is limited, and my vernacular has rough edges. For example, I know that I’ve probably over-edited if I use the the word “vernacular.” When I over-edit, I end up with an urbane style of writing that makes me cringe when I read it. For example, my natural voice would never call anything “urbane.” When I realize that I have gone too far with my revisions, I am grateful that my word processing program lets me retrieve previous versions of whatever I’ve written. My best writing is often my penultimate effort (even if I had to look up “penultimate” in an online dictionary to make sure that I was using it correctly).
I read random chapters of Walden at least once a year. It is the closest thing I have to a manual for life. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that perfection has no timeline. He also wrote that he left the woods because he had other lives to live. In terms of helping me figure out when it is time to move on from a particular piece of writing, Walden is not useful.
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