Going Spelunking

[mobiusstripper]

Tonight's the night, y'all. I am going to wade into the depths of an abandoned draft and start rewriting. There is NOTHING I hate more than reading my own drafts. I will procrastinate for months between finishing a draft and editing because I hate it so much. Back when I used to act, I could never watch myself on video. It's the same exact thing. I know it's bad and completely unsustainable for an artist, and it's something I acknowledge that I need to just get over.

The funny part is that the draft is usually not that terrible in the end, and even if parts of it are truly awful, it's not that hard to fix. I'm not sure what I'm so afraid of. I suspect part of the problem is that I force myself to go into a trance and shove aside my inner control freak while I'm writing because if I didn't, I'd never get a single word onto the page. But then I need that control freak part of me to be at peak performance to edit, and the control freak part of my mind is intimidated by the uninhibited part and the potentially weird, embarrassing, uncomfortable stuff it has to say. At the same time, weird and uncomfortable is ON BRAND for me and something I actively cultivate, BUT in a very specific way. Weird and uncomfortable in a targeted, thought-out way is good. Unintentionally weird and uncomfortable is bad.

Do I need to rethink my need for control over my attempts at transgression? It makes me think of my senior year of undergrad when I was in this religious studies seminar. It dealt with surveillance, imperialism, and authoritarianism as modern representations of the eyes of God. You know, classic liberal arts shit, highly mock-able. But it was a great course with a brilliant professor. Anyway I wrote a paper on the book Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which features a conspiracy called the Wallflower Order that is basically the white patriarchal colonialist anti-fun brigade. They, like me, crave control and hate dancing, but, unlike me, they want to piss on everybody's parade. So I wrote the first draft of my paper and went to discuss it with my professor in office hours. He read it, and then he said, "It's an exemplary essay, and that's the problem. It's like it was written by the Wallflower Order."

Therein lies my predicament.

Comments

[purglepurglepurgle]

> Back when I used to act, I could never watch myself on video.

High-five. (in my defence, what the fuck were my hands *doing*?!)

I'm thoroughly shameless so idk how much my thoughts on this will help, but fwiw: with making stuff, I think the most helpful thing is to make so much stuff and put so much stuff out there that you stop investing as much importance in any one piece, and also notice and analyse how you feel when you read others' work. If you see something cringey or otherwise imperfect in someone else's work, you probably don't go 'THIS WHOLE THING IS WORTHLESS BURN IT BURN IT', you might just wince and move on and enjoy the rest, and I think it's freeing to accept that your work will sometimes be in that space, for future-you or for others, and it's not too big a deal. And by just making loads, you feel more free to experiment with tone and style, have a piece that's controlled, have another that's all over the place, make a mess, etc. Then there's stuff like writing a page just for the exercise of rereading and editing it, writing a novel that you decide you'll never share anywhere before you put down the first word, all that jazz. And then just the general learning you get from encounters with Weird and Uncomfortable in the process of working out *why* it feels weird and uncomfortable and really delving into it.

Idk if any of that helps but as time's gone on I've found that the worst elements in my older work were things that I had no chance of fixing at the time because they were down to lack of life experience, so realising that took some pressure off when attempting to edit to the guessed-at sensibilities of future-me, because turns out it's impossible. I tend to imagine a friendly and curious older woman is reading my work and the criticisms she might make (which can help to tease out my own attitudes to things and what my exact issue is with something I've written beyond 'uuuuurgh'). I feel comfortable writing a lot more difficult/serious material than I used to, even though I'm sure there'll be stuff that sets my teeth on edge if I reread far enough in the future. I mentally split things into separate projects a lot now, where each is kinda its own bubbled off learning/training experience, so that editing is now a lot more 'is this in line with what I want to do with this project?' and less 'gotta get this perfect'. Because I used to fuss more and it didn't make the end result any better.