About Editing Balls and Norway

Post 1936:

Writing a story takes courage. Not storming the ramparts and rescuing the princess courage, but one of the courages. Time is valuable and more precious than we can fathom, so when a person chooses to use such a precious gift for purposes of making make-believe that matters, there’s something to it.

Until they point me toward the battle, I guess I’ll keep on making stuff up, summoning the will to confront the old blank page.

But then comes the page filled with words. Words you wrote. If you care at all about being good, you have a fresh confrontation before you. Which do you lose? What has to be there even if you aren’t in love with it? Is it for you or for the person who might read it?

The wordy page, the one that needs the changes—tackling that page takes balls. Editing is the most rewarding and most agonizing part of the writing process, if you ask me, and I’m the only one you should ask. If looking over and over and over at sentences once written confidently, questioning those sentences, questioning myself, questioning life choices, and still managing to produce novels, I’d have the gold medals. All the gold medals.

However good Norway is at the Winter Olympics, I’m better at my thing.

That’s my opinion, anyhow. And how about those Norwegians? Balls. Cold and small, but formidable.

I’m going to edit that last part out. Cheers and see you after.