Every day I strip my writing.
Sometimes I work on small business features.
Sometimes it’s advertorials.
When I get a chance, it’s a picture book, or a self-help piece.
But no matter what it is, I always go through the same debilitating process of cleaning up prose. The hard thing is sometimes they’re good parts I fall in love with, but they’re also completely wrong for what I’m working on.
Why Editing Prose is Like Editing Your Life
It’s hard to let go of what seems right.
It’s difficult to push my finger down on delete when I want so much to find a place for that phrase.
It’s heartbreaking when I must finally let it go.
But I realized that the alternative, leaving out of place words just because I can’t part with them, ends up spoiling everything.
How familiar that song sounds when sung about love, friendships, jobs that don’t work.
On the surface, they look good, they seem right. We’re hooked in deep. They serve our need for certainty and comfort. We’re too afraid to be in the space between where we are to where we want to be.
It’s not easy to let go into nothingness.
But when we are courageous, when we’re willing to give up whatever or whoever it is, the mystery of the unknown will surprise us with life-growing and healing gifts.
Like the ill-fitted sentence that must be sacrificed in order to create a whole piece, sometimes we need to give up the certainty in our lives, for the pleasure and joy that comes with finally, letting go.
