Type delete type What writers do (or Why Im editing my life)

Type delete type What writers do (or Why Im editing my life)Type delete type What writers do (or Why Im editing my life)Im currently working on a book project, which explains why I found myself binge-watching videos on Instagram the other day.In my senseless searching, I stumbled across a video of an author speaking to a group of writers, where she admits, to her own chagrin, that she just spent the day editing her introduction for the tenth time instead of writing.She said, I spent three hours moving words around on a page, thinking I welches writing. But I wasnt writing. I wasnt adding a word to my word count. I was hiding.The audience applauded.This both inspired and troubled me. It inspired me because I had literally just done this that day editing and re-editing the introduction to a new book Im writing with a friend. And I wondered now if I had just wasted my time.And it troubled me because it seems shortsighted. Part of writing is not writing. Of course, you cant complete a bo ok if you never get past a few hundred words on a page. But at the same time, so much of writing is not just creation. Its curation. All good writing is rewriting, they say.Type. Delete. Type.This is what we writers do. And it cannot be ignored, avoided, or accelerated. You put the words on the page, rearrange them, remove some of them, add mora words, and at some point get something that looks complete.Its never really finished, of course. Thats the beauty and tragedy of it all. You can always tinker and play with it, and many do just that.F. Scott Fitzgerald always carried around a copy ofThe Great Gatsbywith him wherever he went, because he was never fully satisfied with it, making constant notes and corrections to it until the end of his life.Fitzgerald was continually chasing the ideal of his art and never finding it. Maybe, in a way, we all are.So lets talk about that.In plus-rechnen to this blog post, I also recorded a podcast to expand on the idea of what writers really do. You can listen to it here.Why Grady Tripp couldnt stop writing (or when writing isnt writing)Recently, I watched a movie about writers calledWonder Boys. In it, the main character Grady Tripps first novel was a big hit, and now he is struggling to finish his next book. Years past deadline, he is constantly under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and everyone thinks hes blocked.Turns out, Grady is not blocked at all. Hes written well over 2,000 pages, pages about horse genealogies and dental records and who knows what else. When a student calls him out for not making any choices, he gets defensive.But then (spoiler alert) in an interesting turn of events, he loses the manuscript. It flies out the window and goes straight into the river. Afterward, someone asks what the book was about, and Grady says, I dont know.If you dont know what the story was about, then why were you writing it?Because, he admits, I couldnt stop.Writing is not just about meeting a word count. It is about sayin g something. Just because youre typing doesnt mean youre communicating. And just because youre deleting doesnt mean you arent making progress.Why everything must die before it can be rebornWhen you feel stuck, the worst thing you can do is stop. The second worst thing you can do is keep going in the wrong direction. This is true in writing, and this is true in life. Editing is as much a part of the writing process as composition.Making something is not just about adding a new piece to the larger whole. Sometimes, its about taking something away. And were not just talking about writing anymore, are we?Lately, Ive been reconsidering some of my most deeply-held beliefs. As one friend put it, Im taking some dusty ideas off the shelf, re-examining them, and deciding if I want to put them back on the shelf.For a while, I felt bad about this until a psychotherapist/priest friend of mine explained that all healthy spiritual and emotional journeys follow a simple process of deconstruction an d reconstruction. Heres he describes itThesisFirst you believe something.AntithesisThen you believe the opposite of that something.SynthesisThen you find a way to reconcile the something with its seeming contradiction.(Side note Rob Bell has a pretty interesting podcast on this concepthere.)It is in a paradox that truth is found and often deepened. We sometimes have to destroy what weve built to create something better.Everything is always ending, and everything is always beginning. That was made clear to me the other weekend when I had a friend die, another friend announced he was getting divorced, and another friend decided to leave his job and strike out on his own. All in a weekend.Endings and beginnings. Thats life.And thats writing.The trick, it seems, is not to keep doing what youre doing. Its to edit. To ask why youre doing it in the first place. Im currently doing this with my life and my business, and my writing- and its scary as hell. But it also feels right. Because I kn ow some things cant be born until other things die.Creation is always an act of resurrection.Hows the writing going?So when someone asks you, Hows the writing going? and youve deleted more words than youve typed today, dont feel bad.Sometimes, finishing is overrated (dont tell my friend Jon I said that).When you find yourself working on that book and the word count doesnt measure up to the goal, understand you are probably more on track than you realize. You are doing the work. Type. Delete. Type. Remember?Dont just measure what youve done but also what youre doing. They both matter. The secret to doing good work is not just about crossing finish lines. Its about running good races.Some races we finish, and some we only begin. But most of us got into this work not to amass a bunch of medals but for the joy of the run. Almost every great writer dies with an incomplete manuscript, and maybe this is as it should be. They died doing what they loved - not finishing, but creating.Plus, y ou never know what might happen to those abandoned and incomplete works. I always loved that Tolkien story Leaf By Niggle in which an artist spends his entire life working on a single painting of a tree and never finishes it.Then in the afterlife, he discovers not only the tree but a whole forest and a garden for him to tend. What he began in one life, he was able to complete in another. And what he could only imagine in one life became a reality in another.Maybe thats how it works. We chase the ideal, and all our vain efforts to make something measure up are just that - vain. Vain but beautiful and even more important worthwhile.What better way to spend a life than in pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful? Thats how Im trying to spend mine, anyway.Oh, and those Fitzgerald edits I mentioned, the mere tinkerings of an obsessive perfectionist? Well, after the authors death, that old, marked-up copy ofGatsbywas discovered. And the edits he made ended up in future versions o f the book. So you just never know what comes from a work you start but never quite finish.Thisarticlefirst appeared onGoins, Writer.