Tear it Out, Forget it, and Move On
In “The Writing Life,” Annie Dillard suggests that cutting loose a beloved paragraph is one of the hardest things a writer must do.
I lost two of them today. When “Hard Preaching” turned into “Call Me Israel and I Shall Proclaim the Day of the Lord,” my two favorite paragraphs just didn’t work anymore.
These were the two paragraphs that were the heart of the thing in the beginning.
I was in denial for a time. I tried to bend the essay so they could stay, but in the end they had to be sacrificed for the good of the cause. I pulled them out by the roots, cursing because I knew it would be a couple of hours work just to graft all the loose ends together and clean up the mess.
I couldn’t bring myself to delete them, so I planted them in a Word document and put it in my greenhouse folder. Maybe someday I will return to find that they have sprouted into something beautiful.
It’s doubtful. I have over a hundred files like this, all of them little orphaned phrases and paragraphs that I loved once upon a time. I’ve never managed to coax any of them back to life.
On Another Note
I spoke with Chuck on the phone yesterday, which was comforting. I have a better sense of what I need to do and what is going to happen next. Right now the only thing for me to worry about is finishing the twelve new essays for the book. I’m on number six. I had hoped to be done by the end of January, but it’s a little different writing this way. When I’m posting things on the blog, I finish them up and put them online. Then I forget about them and move on.
When I’m writing for the book I get saturated with the one I'm working on, so I open one I've "finished" and tinker around with it. Not good. I have discovered that after a time you lose the ability to hear your own writing. Once you've passed that point, you either need to be done or you need to put it away for a long time.
I now pledge to stick with one essay, finish it, and send it on to Chuck. Work it; finish it; email it; move on. This is my new mantra.
rlp
6:25:17 PM 
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