It Gets Easier, but It Also Doesn't 🕸️ Issue 9
Lessons from the Sisyphean editing process and getting things done, regardless of ease.
I’ve been working on a certain novel project since November 2021. It didn’t start out as a novel project. It started out as an idea for a short story competition whose deadline I simply could not organize myself well enough to meet (story of my life). It was meant to be a maximum of 5,000 words. At the time of me composing this post, it is more than 80,000 words long (again, story of my life). My first “finished” draft of this “short story” was about 9,000 words. Every individual I shared this “finished draft” with came to a consensus: the story was not finished. A year and a half later, it still isn’t.
Nevertheless, around December 2022, I came to a point in the narrative where I felt an intermission could justifiably appear, if it had been a play. I decided that everything I’d drafted so far could be considered part 1 of 2 of the novel, and that I might as well throw my agent and editor something, proof of life, shall we say. The problem was that my vomit draft (which is what I call my draft zeroes) was altogether unfit to be seen by any eyes other than my own. Therefore, between April and May 2023, I spent about 65 cumulative hours attempting to polish the vomit draft of Part 1 into something vaguely digestible. This process, unexpectedly, was an emotional roller-coaster.
There is a reason why vomit drafts are called vomit drafts. The manuscript seemed to me, at several points, entirely unreadable. I adopted a chronological scene-by-scene editing process. More often than not, whenever I opened a new vomit draft scene with the intention of starting the required surgery, my immediate reaction would be to suddenly get very drowsy and think about shutting down my laptop and simply wallowing in despair. Reading the vomit draft of a given scene felt like surveying the chaotic aftermath of a hurricane. It was inconceivable that I, a single confused human being, could clean up the mess to any substantial degree. Surely, this magnitude of mess was above me, but might also just be so unsalvageable as to be above anyone. This feeling occasionally got so bad that I would take breaks from editing, for a day, several days, for a week, simply because each time I thought of opening the Scrivener file of my novel-in-progress, I would be consumed by a visceral fear of facing my horrible manuscript and the insurmountable task of fixing it.
Eventually, I would find the courage to get back into the manuscript. Inevitably, the longer I spent in the text itself, sitting with it, staring at it, shifting entire paragraphs, taking fifteen minutes each to rewrite single sentences, the easier the process would get. My heart rate would come back down to normal. I would remember how to find joy in the process of trying to write a novel. By the time I finished editing a scene, I would conclude that indeed, my vomit draft was not unsalvageable. There was hope for the manuscript after all because the first draft of each scene was always exponentially less trashy than its vomit draft.
This process taught me an important lesson: that it gets easier. All you have to do is remain in your seat with your arms shackled to your office chair armrests (except, not literally, because you need to type, duh) and suffer through your eyes bleeding from the torture of reading and re-reading your horrendous dung-pile of words until you figure out how to take those words apart and reconstruct them into a semblance of coherence. It worked every single time. All I had to do was sit with the draft long enough and try to push through my anxiety about how long it sometimes took to crack a scene open until it became fixable.
Octavia Butler said, in one of her essays reprinted within Bloodchild and Other Stories: “People who want to write either do it or they don’t. At last I began to say that my most important talent—or habit—was persistence. Without it, I would have given up on writing long before I finished my first novel. It’s amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.” Or, as it turns out, if we refuse to get up until the timer on our clock app that you we to measure our daily quota of writing time tells us that we are released.
With renewed courage from completing edits on a scene, I would then open the next vomit draft scene to read through it, determine what magnitude of surgery needed to be done… and immediately get overwhelmed again. All the emotions from before, rinsed and repeated. Unsalvageable. Writing too horrible to do anything with. Shut the laptop and walk away. And again, I would find a way to sit down and trudge through it, a word, a sentence, a centimeter, at a time. By the end, I’d be breathing a lot easier. Only for the next unedited scene to send me back to the top of the cycle.
This process taught me another important lesson: that it does not get easier. Every new scene meant beginning the panic process all over again, even if I’d done it twelve times before over the previous month and a half. Each vomit draft was a fresh battle, and even though I knew that I had won all the previous ones so far, it didn’t stop me from worrying that this new scene in front of me would be the one to succeed in finally squashing every last shred of vim I had to complete this manuscript.
Of course, this portion of my story has a happy ending. On May 18th, 2023, I completed initial edits on Part 1 of my novel-in-progress and successfully emailed it to the folks at the agency. While Part 1 of the vomit draft had stood at about 61,000 words, the lightly but painstakingly edited Draft 1 of Part 1 was about 55,000 words (I edited out a lot of the chaff that I needed for scaffolding but not necessarily for the scenes themselves).
Very recently, I returned to work on this novel-in-progress, vomit drafting Part 2. It feels a little bit harder than vomit drafting Part 1, but it’s also possible that I’ve forgotten just how arduous vomit drafting Part 1 really was. In drafting I’m now going through something similar to my editing process. Each time I open my notebook to a fresh page, or a new scene on my Scrivener file, I feel fresh panic about generating new words to turn my outline into a draft. The panic fades by the time I’m nearing the end of a scene and starts right back up when it’s time to move on to the next one.
I think my overall takeaway from this experience is that I need to let go of the idea that it gets easier. Maybe, to some extent, it’s true, but on the whole, I have to be prepared for every step towards the top of the mountain (or the end of a novel manuscript) to be as hard as the last. I still have to just take the next step, and the next, and the next. Octavia Butler was right: the most important talent is persistence. Because even if it never gets any easier, the point is that it can and will get done, if only you stick it through to the end.
Until next time,
The Spider Kid 🕸️
PS: Spider Kid News
I recently published a blog post of updates about my life and what I’ve recently been and will be up to. If you’re at all interested, feel free to check out “The Affirming Results of Shooting My Shot” on the Spider Kid’s blog.