I hate revising. Not the first time through, mind you. Revising after that shitty first draft is fun, fruitful, and productive. The memoir takes shape as it morphs from random musings into a coherent book with insight and profundity (at least one hopes). It’s the next revision, the next draft, and finally the editing, that turns me into a procrastinating hypochondriac that suddenly finds fourteen household projects that need tending to.
The draft of my memoir about pets and my overall obsession with animals has been done for months…sort of. My goal was to have it publishable by summer. My last day of teaching is the Friday before Memorial Day…I have just less than two months to get my shit together.
I’ve printed off the 298 pages twice now. I’ve marked them up in my customary pink ink, killing my darlings, eliminating my gets, and fixing my verb tense issues, which has plagued me since high school. But those are the easy corrections, the ones that need to be done, the stuff that a writer knows will make the finished product That Much Better. What stymies me is the banality of it, the this-is-junk-and-serves-no-purpose, the this-sounds-like-a-third-grader-wrote-it, or worse—why did I bother with it at all in the first place?
Perfectionism kills all creativity—I know this. Perfectionism is the devil on my shoulder, Mommie Dearest with her white night creamed face that is screaming at me that the bathroom isn’t clean enough. She’s also found the wayward wire hanger that ruins an otherwise organized, pretty closet, full of pink satin hangers. We all knew it was there—now she’s shaking that dry cleaning hanger inches from my nose. So why not toss everything out of the closet and start over, because that wire hanger spread like an infectious disease to all the other hangers—everything must be tossed so that one can start again with a completely empty closet. While we’re at it, let’s throw two entire cans of Ajax all over the bathroom, use barely any water, and scrub, scrub, scrub. Then she bales on me, with a bathroom that looks like a flour factory explosion and a bedroom floor that is covered in every item from my now-empty closet. Thanks, Mommie Dearest. On the plus side, now I won’t have time to revise, since I’ll be cleaning and organizing, because we all know one cannot write in the midst of a mess.
I’m being overly dramatic—I know this, too. That’s the problem. I know it. It’s like those beginning seconds of a panic attack, one I know I’m causing, yet I can’t stop it. I try to talk myself out of it, for on a rational level, I know that if I can trigger a panic attack, I should also be able to thwart one. But that’s not how it works. Try not thinking of purple pandas now that I’ve mentioned it. The brain is a funny thing.
My manuscript sits on my trunk in my office, clipped with one of those wide metal clamps that make a bundle of copy paper look important. My goal over Easter weekend is to edit all the pink ink into my Word document. A doable goal. The problem is after—then what? Do I print it off again, for the fourth time, and go through it. When will it end?
I’ve already mentally done the column thing, the pedantic therapist trick where you write down all the positives in one column and all the negatives in another. Positives: unique topic, interesting perspective, universal themes for animal lovers. Negative: dumpy writing, who will care about any of this but me, and cringe-worthy descriptions. I’m no Sylvia Plath, but I don’t want to be. She wrote I am, I am, I am. I’m certainly not going to write I Sylvia, I Sylvia, I Sylvia.
I’ve given up on the traditional publication route. I’m a quitter, plain and simple. After sending in poems and essays for a good three years (not three consecutive years, just three random years when I decided that I would spend an exorbitant amount of time and effort just submitting crap rather than writing more crap) and never receiving any response (nowadays are not the same of those of Plath’s days, where one received a rejection letter in the mail—now you submit your beloved material into a submission form, where it probably never even gets opened, much less read and critiqued before it is promptly rejected), I gave up. I decided my time was better spent writing than hoping to be published. I have the horrible attitude of thinking that only people from New York and those with MFAs and those who know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone gets published (sometimes I don’t think I’m too far off on that assumption). Plus, I already self-published a memoir and a poemoir, both cringe-worthy attempts at writing. But that’s part of my problem with my current manuscript. I’ve already done that first one, put it out there for readers, even had a newspaper article on it, sold it at book fairs, and I’m now thoroughly embarrassed that I let people read such an awful book. That’s even more pressure, more perfectionism, demanding that this new memoir be ten times better.
What if it’s not?
It’s impossible to know. During one revision, I’ll grimace at certain chapters, but then smile and think how wonderful the next few chapters are, patting myself on the back, reflecting how no one has ever written about such a thing. (That may be true. I doubt many people can devote an entire chapter to Grumpy Bear.) When I read something as convoluted as Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism by Elizabeth Tallent, I think how did this get published? Then I’ll read an insightful passage, one that’s written with a poetic flare, a perfect paragraph that precisely articulates complicated feelings, and then I’ll think, mine’s a piece of shit. Or I’ll read the likes of Matthew Perry’s or Jennifer Grey’s memoir and think, whoop-dee-doo. We buy such books for the details, to read a slice of a celebrity lifestyle we’ll never know, not for their literary magnificence. Or better yet, the disaster that was the The Woman Beyond the Attic: The V.C. Andrews Story. On my most perfectionist days, none of my revised chapters are as bad as that.
Or are they?
This is when I wish for a fairy godmother to wave her magic wand and fix the problems I cannot see or the problems I readily see and have given up trying to perfect. When she’s done with my manuscript, she can wave her wand on me and bestow upon my head the likes of Barbie hair, full, thick, curly, and glorious (or just give me Cat Deeley’s hair).
The first day of my Easter vacation is nearing its end and I haven’t even picked up my important-looking bound copy of typed paper covered in pink ink. How difficult is it to fix these marked imperfections into my Word document? Very. Because my revisions to the third degree still won’t fix it, won’t make it perfect. Or finished. Perhaps that’s the word I want to use more than perfect at this stage—I need it finished, so that I can move on to my next project, so I can start the torture all over again.
I should close this document and set to work on those revisions. But I forgot to buy mini tots at the grocery store this morning, so I should probably run that errand first. And while I’m out, I might as well stop at the mall for my lipstick and Cinnabon frosting (but do that first, as it wouldn’t make sense to leave frozen goods in my trunk). By the time I return home, I’ll have to make supper and eat said supper, then clean up. Oh, and I have to take inventory of my Memorial Day flowers for the cemetery…by that time, I’ll be ready to wash my face and plop on the couch to watch the next episode of Manhunt.
Might as well wait until tomorrow morning to tackle those revisions. Of course, only after I complete my next Book Smart episode, organize the dog’s toys and toss all those wayward limbs and skins, and bake a carrot cake (it is the bunny’s holiday, after all), and wash the car, scrub the corners of the bathroom floor that have collected from hairspray grime, write labels for the folders in my file cabinet…