Before I go ahead and open heart into this blog post, I
feel that I should add a small disclaimer here where I praise the bones of my
two supervisors who have, throughout my degree so far, been life-savers for
myself and my project. They have taken time and given thought and I’m absurdly
grateful to both of them for what they’ve already done, and what they will
continue to do over the next 18 months.
That being said, nothing that my supervisors can do will
silence the panicked process that I have now come to accept as simply being:
The way I edit things.
One Monday I had a joint supervision session with both
supervisors as a follow-up to my first draft, which they had both read and scrutinised
ahead of this meeting. My second supervisor had not only read the whole
manuscript but had also annotated the whole thing, giving me a coversheet with
comprehensive notes about the whole book and specific comments scribbled on the
pages that followed. It was wonderful, it really was. They both talked through
issues with me – none of which were things I disagreed with – and, after a
decent chunk of time away from the book, I actually left this session feeling –
wait for it – quite excited (!) by the prospect of returning to my project. I
would be writing again, and I would be working towards a second draft which
would, will, be much cleaner than the first, and I even felt in a good frame of
mind to tackle this ‘butchery’ that my supervisors had warned me was an
inevitable part of the process.
‘You’ll go a year without writing sometimes, and you’ll
hate it, but then when you do write again you’re so focussed because you know
what the book is missing so you can just sit and write.’ I’m paraphrasing, but
this was the basic idea that I left with.
I saw a friend on Tuesday, relayed the meeting to him, and
then said, ‘All in all, I feel quite calm about the whole thing.’
He leaned forehead and pressed the back of his hand against
my forehead.
‘Who are you?’
‘Oh, I know this it won’t last,’ I replied. ‘I’m just
saying, at the minute I feel quite calm.’
And I was right, too. It didn’t last.
The first ‘wobble’ appeared some time Thursday afternoon
when I took the marked up manuscript out the folder and started to skim through
it. This lasted about a minute and a half – I’m probably being generous with my
timing there – before I put the manuscript back inside the folder, returned to
my desk, and stared at the wall for another minute and a half – again, this
might be generous – before, in no uncertain terms, thinking to myself, ‘How the
f- am I ever going to fix this?’
But it’s okay because this, I have realised, is part of my
process. I am calm, I am panicked, and then I am prepared – although I haven’t
quite hit this last one yet, I am determined to push it into action at some
point today (if you hear howls of anguish in the far distance, assume that it’s
me). In a self-indulgent sense, this is the point of this blog
post. I am getting thoughts out of my head, in a hopefully constructive manner,
in the further hope that it will clear out some space for all of those
annotations – some of which will be as simple as ‘wrong word’ or ‘phrasing it
out’; some of which might even be ‘nice’ or ‘lovely’, if I only I took the time
to have a decent look through them.
In a bid to find a learning curve here, I think an
unexpected lesson that I’m starting to extract from doing a PhD is that writing
is not the only part of creativity that has a proper process. Editing – calm,
panic, prepared – also does. And while it may not be 100% effective, 100% of
the time, it seems to have worked so far. I have to have faith, I suppose, that
later this afternoon when I take that draft out of the folder again, a second
wave of calm-meets-preparedness will take over. If not, there’s always
tomorrow.
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