Oh, I Am Excessive @WritingProject, and Twain's Words Resonate with Me on this Friday. Wiping Away My Darlings.

I keep telling myself I need to stop my 12-hour writing days, but because writing is only one of my jobs, I have to get it in during the small windows that present themselves (like the weeks between the spring semester and that of summer). I took full advantage of the fact that I wasn't robing for commencements, attending galas, and celebrating like normal. As sad as it is, I saw it an an opportunity to get on top of writing projects.

Today, I resubmit one of them, and the entire time I kept thinking of Kelly Chandler Olcott preaching, sans Faulkner, Stephen King, Goldberg, and Lamont: Kill your darlings. In fact, Kelly taught me the craft of creating a bucket document to cut and paste all that you once loved, but need to dish to the side (cough cough...someone needed to help this man who overwrites everything - in Kelly's words, "I've never met anyone who writes their way into knowing more than you.")

My first draft of a dissertation was over 600 pages. I was told I was destroying her and would definitely anger my committee..."Get it under 300 pages and we'll talk."

Such a good lesson. Similar to the undergraduate professor who assigned 10-pages, only to hand the papers back and tell us "get it to a page in 24 hours."

It takes me a while, but I learn.

This week, I've been pruning, redirecting, cutting, and repositioning my words on a piece that I'm sort of liking now...since I've trimmed so much of the fat. The first draft was evidence for the court...almost 25 pages writing my way into understanding why I was writing such a piece in the first place. That's trimmed away. I'm closer to the meat of the writing.

I suppose it would be comical animation to see my composing processes in a fast-forward, sketching, drafting, writing, deleting, editing, revising, deleting, editing, writing, revising fashion over the several months it takes to get one piece even considerable for publication. I can say for sure that it is rare that a first attempt every looks anything close to the final one that eventually gets called to be accepted.

I will send this puppy off today, and immediately jump on the 2nd writing project I've been working on over the last few weeks, fully knowing that my life disappears again Monday, when I begin teaching a research course (only to be followed by summer literacy lab work in July).

It is true. Writing is easy for me. It's the crossing out that kills me....perhaps the phase we ignore the most with our students. How else will they come to a similar epiphany unless we expect them to experience all the writing processes?

TGIF. Once again, TGIF.