My growth as a writer has depended upon learning ways to protect myself from myself. Having bipolar disorder, I have had to learn to see flaws without self-abuse, and to correct my work while keeping despair at bay.

While trying to avoid mood crashes during painstaking revision, I stumbled on a way to improve my prose without focusing on my errors. My technique is similar to an exercise Natalie Goldberg introduced in her famous book Writing Down the Bones, which I highly recommend.

She asked readers to write a page or two of text but afterward, instead of combing through the text for what is wrong, you search for the places where your mind is “present.”

What does she mean by the mind being present? Or, to put it a different way, how can the mind be absent? Minds sometimes wander during writing, and empty words take the place of thought. Often there are fillers in writing, kind of like the Styrofoam peanuts in a cardboard package that obscure the real treasure like a new stereo. Something similar happens in conversation when people say “um” or “ya know” a lot.

Like Styrofoam fillers, words often end up obscuring rather than expressing our thoughts. Clunky transitions, inflated language, verbosity, and poor organization can kill reader interest. The Natalie Goldberg exercise is to go through the text and find places where the thoughts appear to “jump off the page” or where there is a sense of clarity. The “filler” is thrown out altogether so there is no need to pick over it.

I loved this exercise and started doing something similar whenever I found myself becoming so self-critical while revising that the words would seem to tangle together into a blur.

I still use my technique a lot. First I make a copy of the passage I want to revise. Then I find the parts I like most and highlight them, sentences or phrases where the prose is transparent, honest, vivid, or intriguing. I look for text that evokes the original vision that drove me want to write the piece in the first place.

I delete the rest.

Drastic? Well, maybe, but it is not as drastic as it sounds since I have made a copy; if I change my mind about the passages I have cut, I can always bring them back. But after trimming the excess, what I am left with are my favorite parts that, however fragmented, remind me that writing is about building, not shooting down what does not work.

Reminded of my original vision, I work to make the rest of the text rise to the level of the parts I love. I build transitions to glue together the sentences I have broken apart in order to create something new. I use the process mainly in my nonfiction, but it is useful even in fiction as a way to rediscover my focus and get me back on track. It makes me ask, what is the substance of what I want to say? What was the point of view, emotion, or theme that excited me originally?

“Rebuilding” text is not always easy, but I enjoy it. I do not resent the rewriting I do in order to create a product I am proud to share. What makes writing psychologically torturous is that we are wired to locate and shoot down errors in our writing. Revision is like a game of Whack-a-Mole without any of the fun. Ew gross! Bad, bad, bad! Get it out NOW!

We approach out work with a trouble shooting mindset. Instead of watering flowers we are pulling weeds. As we do, the neglected flowers wither. “Rebuilding” allows me to return my focus to the flowers.

Visual art offers a similar example. Michelangelo said he saw sculptures in stone and his objective was to cut away everything that was not the sculpture, thereby releasing a form from its rocky prison. Even though he chipped away all the useless parts, he never lost sight of the original vision that inspired him.

Too often, writing feels more like killing than bringing something new to life. The dream of what could be becomes lost as enthusiasm fizzles. Remembering to focus on the parts that appeal to us reconnects us with our original vision and illuminates the way forward so that, headed for the flowers, we can leave the weeds behind.

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