Writing, Editing, and the Metaphor of My Brain’s Fantastical Obscurity

Writing this begins as I write everything else. A blank page, a new document, a fresh canvas for ideas to morph into sentences and get out of hand into a four-page paper or a short story I will never finish. Words can be hard to come by, a commodity when staring at an empty page or rough draft. They can feel like a toy on a shelf you long for with all your being, you can reach it if you just stand on your tip toes and reach out your fingers; but mom said no and your allowance for the week is just a few dollars short from the big glossy $15.99 printed underneath it. Even when I finally catch the toy, when my ideas click with the part of my brain that churns out words like an unreliable old rusty machine, I still cannot help but feel stuck in the moment where my arm was stretched out reaching.

Some may say editing is just for the finished product, for the draft that has been prepped and preened for prying eyes. I disagree; I think some of the most important editing I do for my work is while my arm is still outstretched. While I am counting my shabby allowance money between my small and naive fingers. When I am deciding how to connect the bridge between my words and my ideas to walk over the void of my consciousness. For the writer, the process of writing and editing is not to be separated, no matter how tempting; at least in my humble opinion. Thinking of editing as an entirely separate process instead of an extension by which we demonstrate our mastery kills off entire new generations of work. For every word I have decided to write in this very sentence, I am creating new worlds of language and editing it back down all at the same time. Every syntaxial decision we sift between our fingers as we write is just as much of an edit as a shadowy figure with a red pen held like a sword between their teeth. Editing, itself, is a verb. A to do. Even the job of an editor is to exist as the tool through which the edits flow. 

You are the embodiment of doing when editing or writing a text; but as my consciousness struggles to consume me whole, I am fighting to keep my brain’s connecting wires plugged in. As I struggle against the dueling holds of the writer and the editor I realize that I have begun to forget. I am in the middle of a sentence; “...the students fight for their…” Fight is too boring of a word to use in this context. I need something with more meaning. Is that actually spelled like that? Suddenly, I have no idea what I am talking about at all. I do not remember what the word I grasping loosely at the wisps of is. How to bridge the gap between what it means to explain something and then again understand it. 

But I should not stop writing, or I will forget what I was trying to say. There is a tear, however, in my concentration, now. 

I am begging myself not to open that tab to google that word, to just keep going, but even the thought of it, the decision to do it or not, has woken me from my dream and I cannot quite remember how it ended. Now, I am at an impasse. Do I settle for just “good” or do I flip through the dusty pages of my digital thesaurus until I land on something “terrific”? 

A word, a semi-colon, a comma, just out of reach from where the words ebb and flow in the background of my consciousness. It is always a difficult decision, to stay or to go. If I stop now the words will begin to turn into a watery-mush and leak out of my ears, I try to catch them but the misplaced comma in the middle of the page is too glaring and distracting. I must switch my attention to scanning for grammatical errors littering my sentences. I am constantly battling with this decision. Why must I choose between the edit and the write? Am I simply too unskilled to handle both, or is no one capable? Am I not alone? To edit is to be; and I am now existing within my writing like a choppy-banged protagonist in a shitty movie about being stuck in a video game. I am running after my overuse of commas as if I am being chased, because, maybe I am. 

Author and editor, the same but so different. Staring at yourself in the mirror and in the reflection of your long cold coffee and wondering why part of you is so adamant that you delete this sentence that you claimed to love. Your magnum opus crumbles in your own hands as you try to place how and why it sounds so similar to something else you read somewhere. I cannot help but pick everything apart. I am not finished yet, but I am closer to being done than when I started, therefore it is time for the clean-up crew to come in. I must remind myself, this is still a construction site. I can sweep as many times as I please but the workers are still hammering away and letting all the dust in. But the draft is not perfect and therefore must be fixed. Maybe an edit here or there can be helpful. The slightly lopsided and loosely placed bricks can be shifted so that the rest of the building will not collapse when I take out a wall to make room for a more organized, open, and academically worded living room. 

Except I just said the word room twice in the same sentence and now everything has started to crumble. I once again feel I must choose. I have so much more to say, and now more space to do it, but what is the point of all this decor if there is dust everywhere and we forgot to install a floor. The reader now may sense this every rotating circle of disagreement between the author and the editor; asking themselves, do the edit and write always fight this much? Sometimes they do, sometimes they do not. They understand their need for each other, the need for balance. One could not exist without the other, even if they may try. Even when my draft is finished and my best work is laid out on the page, the writer agrees that the piece looks better after the editor has come through, cleaning up the messes made between beautiful lines of prose.

The editor understands that there is nothing to fix up and arrange neatly with a bow if the author has not written anything. There is no tone to examine or audience to think about if a piece is never written. But even in their understanding, they become impatient with each other; not always, but at times. Which is why the writer continues over the editor's frantic screams and the editor pushes the writer out of the way mid-sentence to delete this whole section and start over. 

We also must not forget that they are each other. A soul cannot live without all the parts that make itself up. When we are editing, our own work or someone else’s, the piece of us that is the writer does not go away. They often help us to understand why something sounds better this way than another. To understand why a writer is so adamant about their intended audience even if the editor does not agree. The only way to truly understand editing and its full capabilities is to write. Writing means fighting tooth and nail with our own internal editor for balance. Understanding our own grammatical existence is how we learn to be a better writer. Despite its pain, its destruction, and its suffering, editing can be the key to the best piece we have ever written. That does not mean we always understand the perspectives of our writer and our editor, but maybe it means they can learn to get along.