On Editing

Recently I've been doing a lot of editing, in part because I've been having trouble doing "real" writing. As a matter of fact, I wrote an entire angry rant-poem in my journal, which I've decided not to publish, blaming everyone in my life for my recent literary troubles - except for myself, of course.

I view writing as a gift from God, and as a way of fulfilling my task as a human being. A while back, I had a class with Niyi Osundare and Syl Cheney-Coker, two magnificent poets who of course are lumped into the same category because they are both from Africa, even though Nigeria and Sierra Leone have very different histories. We were discussing poetry-writing; the conclusion was that living your life to the best expression of who you truly are, is a prerequisite for writing real poetry. So when I have trouble writing, the first question I ask myself is: What is it about the life I am living that is giving me literary difficulties? Am I currently living in a way that is true to who I really am?

I am not about to share the answers to those questions online -yes, even I have a sense of privacy. Instead, I would like to muse a little about my editing process: In order to edit Jeremiah 15-2, I recorded it and played it back to myself. To me, writing is a lot about how something sounds when read out loud - after all, literature has its roots in oral story-telling. Part of the reason poetry and fiction were so entwined in the ancient world (Hello, Homer! Now give me a donut.), is that myths, legends, and fictitious stories were all told by heart - so there had to be some sort of rhyme and meter to help the teller learn the words to the story, as well as to keep the listener enraptured. I  sometimes wonder whether in transitioning from the oral to the written, we have in a certain sense, lost the communal aspect of story-telling.

But that is a rant for a different time. The point is, the whole "did the fire go out" line struck me as sloppy when I heard my work read out loud. Now I am pondering alternatives: Did the fire go out downstairs? Did the fire go out downstairs yet? A part of me thinks that laboring over the minor cadences of this sentence is ridiculous, but I don't view it as a choice. The words are lodged in my head, and they will combine and recombine there as they like. I might as well give in and type them out - which sounds so much less romantic than "write them down".

This difference in romanticism between to such mundane phrases just confirms my belief, that the difference between great writing and good writing, is that in great writing, even the minor sentences, like "Hello. How are you?" or "Did the fire go out?" are the results of deliberate choice, the combination of words selected by the author because it edged out other similiar combinations in a type of "Literary Idol" contest, only hopefully without the presence of Simon Cowell, or excessive amounts of body glitter. Actually, I really like body glitter.

I used to think editing was over-rated. Writing was about that rush of inspiration, not the repetetive process of moving little words around once the inspiration had quieted. But then, my teacher, Pamela Kirpatrick, showed us the first draft of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" - and it was good, but nowhere near as brilliant as the original. Seeing how the work progressed from draft to draft - and how even W.B. Yeats wrote multiple drafts - made me believe in the importance of editing. But sometimes, when I blog my first drafts, I find it strange to edit, since the first draft is now lodged in my mind as "published material", a category I associate with the post-editing phase. So perhaps it's just as well that I actually got a bit of editing done this weekend. Here's to more "real" writing, and to more editing, in the days and years to come.

Also, while I'm on the topic I have to share my favorite Yeats poem, "Leda and the Swan" It's one of those poems that makes me go "Oh, this is why I write. Because I want to one day create something as beautiful as this."