Improve! Speak for yourself, someone says! Yes, I aim to, maybe you will, too. We’re all trying…Take the opportunity to improve your work by looking at your old articles, stories, and seeing if anything could do with a tweak or major revision. Any things you learn in your revising will spill into your current work and only improve it–and at a quicker speed.
It’s a problem that I have been overcoming. With some of my work, a problem when I’m writing is saying so much that some paragraphs become cluttered or not saying enough when a thought should be expanded so as to provide the meaning. But I had to be more thoughtful about these difficulties. I somehow conquered this by getting everything in my head down on paper. And with a certain amount of editing, say it in such a way, that it’s clear. Being more thoughtful in other words.
Difficulties in writing can pass, but one must be aware of them first, for without awareness, then there is no rectifying.
So, I tried to sort it out with those pieces that on second reading sounded a little underdone or overdone.
Eagerness to submit and get published may prevent one from getting the piece right first. A fault of mine in submitting, which may still slip me up from time to time, is submitting before the piece is ripe.
I’ve learnt something from this which I would like to tell others about. That the best time to submit is not immediately after you’ve edited something.
Once this week I thought: I’m still ruthlessly deciding on what devotional ideas to use or not to use. If any are worth writing up formally, so I can relax by writing less.
But the material’s mostly gone –been rubbished, binned and formally incinerated. Remnants, though, survive. Even those I thought I could recycle in another form are mostly gone. But as I say, some survived the burning process. And one has an eye on better devotions for the future.
On last count, a few minutes ago, one-third of my shelved devotions that I have looked at again have been recoverable. The key to recovering them is to focus them on one point. It eliminates waffle.
My first draft looked at a little tatty, what’s new? I was going to flag it. Never to submit the piece. So, I said to myself, leave that genre of writing alone. A day leaving it alone did wonders. Then, I thought, try harder. And I think the piece looks better than before. In a few days, I can send it. A key to not surrendering, a key to not chucking in a piece, is to try harder, when one can’t be bothered. That’s in my experience.
Writing is a catch-22, but I’m not talking ’bout the film or novel on which a film is based. Catch-22 is a novel and a film, but let me use that title’s meaning for the purposes of this post. Saying catch-22 is synonymous with making a choice between two equal values and one or the other won’t really do considering that you’re in a predicament between the two. So, writing is a catch-22 in that sense or something like it. I mean that one may write a piece. The writer thinks he should revise it out of the normal process, and also thinks it’s probably good as it is and doesn’t need revising. What does the writer do? This is my predicament at the moment. I would say to myself, just wait. Let the piece smolder under the surface for a while until it’s ready to resurface and face the writer once again. Then, all becomes clear.
Pete's Eclectic Flying Machine 