Reflections After Clicking "Submit"

For all of you who submitted works to the Vocal Writing Awards ... how are you feeling?

I decided to rework existing pieces to submit, digging deep in my files. I had hoped to write new pieces too, but these intentions floated off in the breeze of calendar pages flipping all too quickly.

So I doubled down on revising. I followed my own suggestions (see Strategies to Make Your "Vocal Writing Awards" Submissions EVEN BETTER) -- I sat in my parked car and read the pieces aloud, printed them out to review on paper, and got my trimming scissors ready.

It was an intensive session, starting late in the game, with that deadline looming. At 11:59, all I could think for some time was, "Holy cow, I squeaked it in!" It wasn't until after a good sleep that it dawned on me: Holy cow, I just learned something about myself as a writer of fiction.

In a nutshell, here's what I gleaned from the editing process:

1. I am an over-writer. Phrases like "in a nutshell" don't trip off my fingers. Once I start writing I don't want to hold back -- sentences and paragraphs and plots have a way of spreading out, kudzu-like. Whatever I see in my imagination I want to put on the page.

There's joy, a sense of liberating power, in letting the words flow freely. Godlike, I speak and a world emerges.

When I enter editing mode, however, I realize that this world has become choked by weed-words. I have to reach for another kind of joy--the liberating power of the weed-whacker--in transforming an overgrown garden to artful arrangement.

I'm used to editing my own pieces in a scrambly postscript to the writing process, whatever I can squeeze in before the deadline. But in this case, the editing was a stand-alone activity, long separated in time from the writing. This made it easier for me to find the joy unique to that work.

The takeaway for me is to try to recreate this delineation, in headspace / heartspace if not in time. I'm casting around for a ritual to help me make an intentional shift in focus: from getting out the words I wanted to say, to selecting the words I want you to read.

Do you have any rituals that help you get into a productive space for self-editing?

3. I'm a visual writer. I often watch a fiction story in my imagination as I write it.

By "visual writer" I don't mean dwelling on the physical setting or appearance of the characters. Those descriptive details are usually pretty fuzzy to me, in what I write as well as what I read. (I'm a ginormous Tolkien fan ... but whenever he waxes on about gorges and glades and glens, my brain glazes over.)

It's more like watching a dream that I can pause or rewind. Scenes flash into my mind -- snatches of dialogue, an emotionally drenched moment, a climactic action sequence, or just a vignette. Then I try to paint it in words.

So how does this relate to editing?

Like many of you, as a child, characters from my favorite books--or from the world of my imagination--often felt more real than the people who swirled around me in "real life." And when I write, these scenes that play out in my mind feel quite vivid to me, like a harvest moon almost close enough to touch.

So when my editing brain decides that a scene or a character needs a radical change, my creating brain sometimes hollers, "Nooooo! That's not the way it happened!" My mind's eye can be a stubborn writing partner. I have to remind myself that imagination is not memory.

Does that sound deranged? Or does this ever happen to you too?

3. I'm an under-writer. No, not the insurance kind. More like a phone cutting out in a tunnel. I drop a lot of words.

Alert reader: "But you just said you're an over-writer. How does that make sense?"

Who said art-brains make sense?

My epiphany was that since I'm a visual writer -- stitching together a story frame by frame -- I under-write in two ways. One is that I sometimes fail to flesh out the connective tissue between segments. A Vocal reader once gave me valuable feedback that two scenes felt jammed together -- they needed more of a transition. Without adequate padding, the pacing can feel jumpy and abrupt, like the recap montage in a Netflix episode.

Another tendency I've discovered is that I under-explain. Because the scenes play out so vividly in my mind, I sometimes assume that everybody has the same view. I leave out crucial details, simply because I forget that I didn't write them down. Or I leave too much to inference, as if what's obvious to me after living with the characters should be equally evident to readers at first meeting. Or I gloss over descriptions to establish the setting, just as I do when I read.

Antoinette L Brey put this way more concisely in a comment on my piece on self-editing: "I tend to need to fill in information, when I go over the first draft. Things which I feel are self explanatory, often aren't."

Thus, as I was revisiting my story for the Vocal Awards, I found myself asking in places, "What the heck is going on here?!?" Then my revising task was to expand and explain until I wasn't confused.

In her brilliant essay On Art & Separation, Vocalist Mackenzie Davis identifies "the true intention of art, one that every artist pours into their work and hopes to evoke in their audience—experience." This well frames the challenge I hope to set for myself to improve my craft.

In the draft stage, I tend to be wrapped up in the world I've inhabited in my imagination, working to capture its essence, recreate its impact. But when I edit, I can try to view this piece of writing through the lens of the reader's experience. Not in order to micromanage their response or interpretation, but to make the story more hospitable for visitors. Because once a reader experiences a story -- in whatever form this takes -- it becomes their world too.

*?*!*?*

I'm quite curious at this point. Have you had any epiphanies about yourself as a writer from revising / re-reading your own work? What else has helped you to "know thyself" as a writer, and what have you learned? If you've written (or are inspired to write) a piece that answers this question, please share a link in the comments!

And -- thank you for reading!