I have come to the conclusion that editing is like a painful, surgery.  It feels something like evisceration when you start, ripping out the guts of your soul, poured out onto the page.  No matter how long you’ve worked on the piece, or how long you’ve set it aside, if it’s one you’ve truly connected to, then there are some parts of it that hurt to think about letting go.  Oh, the absurd number of adverbs or the realization you structured an entire paragraph with simple sentences is easy enough to edit and correct.  There’s no pain in letting go of “viciously” and changing it to something else to get your intent across. It doesn’t hurt to reconstruct your sentences in a new and varying way.  That’s more like a face-lift after decades in the sun or a nose-job after one too many breaks, you can see with ease how it will help.

What starts to hurt is when you realize that this scene, the one you spent days to get just right, the one you can see and hear in your head, is probably extraneous. That no matter how lovingly crafted it is, the scene simply doesn’t move the story forward.  It doesn’t reveal anything crucial. It can be cut and tighten the novel as a whole and your readers will never miss it, never know it was there.  But you will.  You do.  You take it out because you know it’s better for the novel. You cut scenes, clip moments, shorten conversations that delve deep under the surface of your characters, but it hurts.  They aren’t bad. They aren’t poorly written.  They just don’t fit, not the way you thought they would when you first wrote them.

It feels like evisceration, but it’s more like necessary surgery, cutting out potential growths that could turn cancerous and poison the novel as a whole, make it fail, drag your reader’s attention away.  Enough of those little moments, extraneous scenes, could mean the death of your novel on some agent’s desk.  So you cut, no matter how it hurts, because the larger picture, the overall piece, how it all works together is more important than those independent gems that are just a bit out of place.

But it still hurts.

While I have not mastered the habit of blogging here yet, as opposed to my Live Journal which is my less, shall we say, “professional” blog, I have been working hard on finishing the novel.  With an agent interested in seeing more, the pressure is on to make it as solid and polished as I can.

There’s a fair bit of fear running through the idea of it.  While being a published writer is something I have wanted for as long as I can remember, the concept is as terrifying as it is exciting.  Part of it is the notion of finally achieving such a huge success and watching the dream come true.  Another part, of course, is the terror of the “what ifs” that plague all artists.  What if after seeing more, the agent doesn’t want the book?  What if I send out a hundred queries and they all come back telling me it is the most foolish idea for a novel they have ever heard? What if my writing is not as good as my readers tell me it is?  What if it is that good?  What do I do then?  What if achieving my dream changes my life completely? What if I’m not ready?

What if I am?

I spent the long weekend clearing out the junk in my folders and files and shoeboxes stacked in the corner of the closet.  Bits and pieces of my life lay around me on the floor, surrounding me with a lifetime of moments that I thought were worth saving somehow.  Included in all of this were stories from my college writing classes,  stories I submitted to get into MFA programs, stories I read now and cringed a bit.  They aren’t very good.  Oh, they got the grades, but I can see why my professors were never very encouraging.

I could have let this discourage me, plowing through tortured phrases and boring stories about students doing rather ordinary things.  I could have cried at the lack of magic, the lack of spark.  I could have decided that I would never make a good writer, and no matter the 20,000 words I’d strewn across the page in the last few weeks, I should give it all up now, because clearly I was deluding myself that I ever had any talent at all.

I started down that path, I’ll admit it.  All my Law of Attraction work went flying out the window for the space of about five minutes.  But looking harder, I saw something else.  English programs seem to focus on “literary” writing, and though they will acknowledge that Tolkien and Shakespeare could delve deep into myth and legend and write stories with elves and fairies that told deeper truths about humankind themselves, they refused to let a wide eyed nineteen year old do the same.

“I don’t teach genre fiction,” one teacher told me, rejecting me from entering his class without even reading my story.

I remember being crushed, and now, reading the “non-genre” stories that I wrote in an effort to be “literary” I feel angry for that girl I used to be.  “Genre” is a marketing term and one that, yes, we need to be aware of in the publishing world, but the best fiction always defies genre and crosses lines.  Look at The Time Traveler’s Wife.  Is it fantasy?  Is it history?  Is it a romance?  Is it a mystery?  Is it literary?  Yes to all of those, and no at the same time.  It defies categorization.  Even at the bookstore, it gets filed under “Fiction” and none of the clearer “genre” lines.

In the bookstore in my head, where my novel sits on the shelf, proudly, just a few more there in case the front of store display run out, of course, that’s where my stories are.  They are history.  They are myth.  They are fantasy.  They are urban fantasy. They are fairy tales.  They are romances.  More likely, of course, they’ll be in the science fiction/fantasy section, and, really, I am all right with that as well.  But now, thanks to a graduate professor who recognized that a story was a story, no matter if it was gritty and “literary” or plumbed the depths of what it meant to be human by examining the core of the stories we call fairytales, I am writing what I want to write, and looking back on those tortured stories that tried so valiantly to fit themselves into someone else’s definition of “literary fiction,” I hope never to stray from the stories I want to tell, ever again.

It is always an interesting dilemma, wondering what to write for an introduction on the web. Words on the page are sent out into the ether, and somehow we seek to figure out who the person behind them is, and what value they may have for us. Who am I? I am a writer, first and foremost, above all the other professions I have held and the career I work within to pay the bills.

My goal is to be a published writer. To that end, I have one novel nearly finished that I will be polishing and submitting to agents over the next few months and outlines for several others. I hope that one day this blog will be one visited by fans of my work, to hear what I’m working on now or where I will be visiting for book signings next. They say to dream big, and that’s my biggest dream. (Not necessarily fans visiting this site in particular but the having of fans. *g*)

For now it is a place separate from my other journals on the web where I can talk about writing, about inspiration, about the joys and pitfalls of this path. It is a place I can chronicle my forays into the publishing world without it getting lost in the mish-mash of daily ramblings, and a place where, hopefully, I can set forth both my triumphs and my set-backs as I try to make my dreams come true.

I hope anyone who stumbles on this page will find something of value to them in my journey. One of the strongest benefits that comes from autobiography is the connection to the universal, and as readers we have the chance to take something valuable away, a lesson learned or an inspiring thought or a new idea for solving a problem or just a different way of looking at the world. I hope that my explorations of my path help others to find their own.