Gulliver's Travels
This blog, (unlike fucking Twitter,) was a very good call. I’m not expecting feedback, which is fine. But there is something about placing writing in a place where anyone can see it that makes me edit just a bit harder; I’ll review it again, then once more, and once more again. I comb through it with a slightly harsher eye. It’s like making out when your door is open; you’ll try to be just a bit quieter, whether people are listening or not. Usually when I’m done typing out an idea I simply leave it at that. Unrefined and unpolished, I’ll tap save and close the window. But when it comes time to decide which writing to put on that (silly) blog, I’ll spend a good deal longer on the piece than normal.
As a rule of thumb, I won’t submit any writing to a magazine unless I’ve thought about it over a 24 hour period. For example, it’s 12:01 am on Sunday, and I have a tab open for a zine that says SUBMISSIONS. It’s asking me to upload a document, and I have the intended document open now. I’ve read through the piece start to finish, middle to finish, finish to start, with music playing, without music playing, fucking upside down, and now I finally feel there is nothing I can do to make it better. I have written and edited to the best of my current abilities. I upload the document, but don’t click submit, and then…
I make a cup of tea. As I wait for the bag to steep, I close the whole window, and finally shut down the computer. Over the course of tomorrow I’ll ponder the piece some more, look back at it, and make yet more changes. If all goes well, by 1 tomorrow night I’ll have sent it out. What I’m getting is that no piece is ever as good as it could be with just a bit more thinking, a bit more soaking. The less the teabag soaks for, the weaker the tea. Granted, if I let something sit around for too long, the original feeling or idea behind the piece can become muddled, to the point where the initial inspiration behind it is lost. That’s bad. Too-strong tea is disgusting. That’s when something must be done with it. Check it for grammatical errors, check the mechanics of it, oil the squeaky parts and find the right magazine to submit it to, and then toss it out there before it gets cold.
Too often I would submit something, and then read over what I had submitted the next day. On one occasion I actually choked on aforementioned tea because there were not one, not two, but three commas in a row where there shouldn’t have been any at all! Damn! So really, this blog works. I’m going to upload what I’ve just written after about three more revisions- not because it’s being read by a zine editor, or my close friends, or Charles effing Dickens, but because it’s going to a place where it’s fair game. It’s being put in a place where anybody could come along and tear it apart if they wanted. It’s exposed, and whether or not it’s read is not the point. The point is that I want to be ready for said tearing if it ever does come.
(Oh, but of course this is all about writing that I intend to submit to the outside world. Things like personal essays and diary entries are never, ever edited. That’s stupid. Diary entries from straight from the deepest part of the heart. Why would someone want to edit that?)
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