One Piece At A Time (I Wish)
Posted by admin on 10 Jul 2017 at 11:17 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized
At the start of editing, I worked on one piece at a time. No longer. A manuscript section’s been open on the desktop for two hours. I’m happily tunneling around, changing words, tweaking phrases, flipping clauses from one end of their sentences to the other, re-ordering whole sections, when a citation shows up. There aren’t many citations in my memoir draft. Mostly, they’re for texts or films. This one pesters me: is it named properly every time it appears? Does it appear too frequently? The bigger the folder with edited files grows, the more questions about files I’m not editing right now zing through my thoughts. And the more minutes answering them takes. A remark in one piece will remind me of a totally different circumstance in another. Perhaps the topic is the same in both, or students in both hold opposite opinions, or maybe no connection springs out. I envisioned adjusting descriptions to better mask identities, assessing whether situations were presented honestly. Expanding some pieces, eliminating others, doesn’t faze me. I did not anticipate the distractions of lateral thinking. Worse yet: when searching on key words to scrounge up from elsewhere in the manuscript what wasn’t bothersome till a minute before, I find errors I’d feared: not always, not even often, but too much. Working on one piece at a time until it satisfies (for now) is harder and harder.
I leave one piece to gestate and research other projects. Overthinking leads to paralysis. Distance provides perspective.
If you find yourself second-guessing, it’s time to do something else for a while.
Good luck with it! I can’t wait to read it.
Good advice, Angie – thanks.