"When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second---put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal---but even three months will do...You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger, who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book."Zadie Smith
This is perhaps some of the most eloquent advice I've read about editing. Right now I feel caught somewhere between the thick of it and the head of that stranger. I began this novel on November 1st, 2010 and finished on November 30th, 2011. Now it is February of 2012. Some parts of this novel have passed the year mark. Others have yet to reach the three month point. There are pieces of it that surprise me and fill me with such pride to think that those words tumbled out of my brain and through my fingers to that Word document. There are other pieces that I still struggle with, knowing that they haven't quite hit the mark, that they're still a bit off center. Close, but still in need of work.
Every day new ideas circle around inside my head as my brain tries to fit the puzzle pieces into their proper place. It's what I think about when I get up on the morning, what I think about when I drift off to sleep. It's what keeps me moving forward. It's what gives me the hope that I'm on the right track.
So I sit in coffee shops and put in the headphones and listen to music and sip espresso and jot down notes/ideas. I watch people come and go, lovers and friends. I lose hours to this task and never feel tired. In fact, if anything I feel my energy level increase the longer I work.
I find myself savoring time rather than spending it.
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