I hate editing SO DAMNED MUCH.

When I was writing every day in November, I felt great. The book progressed steadily, I was packing the book with ideas and interesting details about the future I had constructed, the plot was solid and progressed well, and I was sure I was making something really worth reading.

So while each day was not exactly unalloyed bliss, creatively speaking, I was happier than I have ever been before.

But now that I am editing (finished first pass on Saturday), my confidence in the work erodes every day and it becomes harder and harder to resist the voice in my head that says it sucks, it’s terrible, you’re terrible, you can’t write worth shit, you’re shit, and so forth and so on.

Part of that, I am sure, is the change in creative output. I went from a nice vigorous routine of writing 1667 or so words per day to writing effectively nothing at all, and I think that was a bad idea. It made sense at the time and it felt like the right decision. I really didn’t feel like going back to writing blog entries or making hastily made little videos any more. Those were great while they were needed but now I had my novel to focus on. Right?

Turns out, though, that editing two or three (or four) chapters a day is nowhere near being the creative output I need in order to maintain my slender grip on sanity, and in fact it feels like the exact opposite of what I was getting when I was writing every day.

It’s just so hard for me to maintain emotional stability when focusing that hard on my work. I’m as neurotic as any intellectual and I know damned well that if I focus on something, my mind will begin picking it apart, destroying it in the process. If I was a different kind of person, somebody with different strengths, I would be able to stick with something I have written until I made it as good as I knew how to make it.

But I am not that kind of person. Sure, in theory, I want whatever I write to be as good as I can possibly make it. Any decent artist does. We all want to do our best.

But I fear that I may not be emotionally stable enough to pull it off. I just do not have the emotional stability to be a perfectionist. The very idea of pursuing perfection scares the bejesus out of me. I can’t view it as anything other than a bottomless void eager to devour anything good I might create and destroy it with doubt, indecision, and self-loathing.

I suppose every artist of every stripe has to face the fact that he might not be capable of work that is good enough by his own standards. The question then becomes, is it possible to go on after that?

It is if you lower your standards. That’s not as dire and dream-killing as it sounds. What is needed is to lower your standards to the point where they are achievable. Often that inner critic is really just our self-doubt abd self-loathing in a cheap disguise and the standard it sets is unachievable by design. The goal moves away from you at the exact same speed that you advance towards and so you never get closer. The low self-worth is maintained at the cost of anything else. It’s a demon wrapped in a nightmare dipped in poison, but it happens. The soul of an artist can be a very dark place.

The key is to set sensible and achievable goals, with some sort of way to quantify or at least verify that you have achieved them.

What a wonderfully sensible and wise and reasonable idea!

Fat lot of good it does me though, because it’s just plain not that easy.

Still, if I manage to keep a grip on myself, and I go back to writing blog entries like this one semi-regularly in order to vent what desperately needs to be vented, I will hopefully be able to calm the fuck down and learn to do this editing thing without having a total fucking meltdown.

Again, I come to the place where I realize that I just have to arbitrarily decide it’s good enough after a certain point and push it out the door so I can go on to write the next thing, which will be better.

I have no idea if my prose is actually good enough for anyone to read. But I know that the more of it I write, the better I get at it, and that is really my own path forward at this juncture.

I know my ideas are good and the substance of the narrative is good. That’s the part of writing I am good at. Story, ideas, emotions, scenes, images… all the stuff of the imagination.

And I know I have mad verbal skills, and that I can create likable characters (and loathable villains) and heartwarming tales and all.

So really, I have nothing to worry about. The substantive stuff is all good, it’s just a matter of developing the nitty gritty skills involved in executing all that potential.

Story of my life, really. Loads of potential but vastly incompetent. It sucks to be talent sometimes. I would sell my soul for someone who was my complementary opposite, someone who is very good at the technique but lack imagination. I could partner with that person in the writing biz and we’d be damned near unstoppable. I would write the first draft and send it to them, and they could take it from there, with final approval resting in both our hands on a veto type basis.

Someone who can provide the support and stability that my fragile psyche cannot. Someone to take my raw ore and make it into brilliant diamonds.

But I guess I will just have to learn to be the editor I’d hoped to marry.

Or something like that.