I've been a writer for a long time, but I've also been a massive procrastinator for a long time. If I know a project will take just an hour or so, there's a good chance I'll start it 65 minutes before it's due. So no matter how much I believe in revision, no matter how well experience has taught me how valuable it is as a writing tool, there are many times I don't enable that process for myself. This semester has smacked me around, though. I'm on board now.
In an effort to jump-start the useful part of my brain, I've made time recently for one of my favorite things -- cryptic crosswords, a.k.a. British crosswords. They are difficult and, for me, so much fun. Give me some wordplay and throw in having to determine which part of the definition is a pun, homophone, anagram, hidden word, Roman numeral, etc., and it's like my dad used to say, "Ma, paste up the baby and put a feather on him!" (Coat the baby's hands with molasses and give him a fluffy chicken feather.) I'm good for hours with my little puzzle book.
When I'm down to between one and four clues left, I often get stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck. It's tempting to look at the answers, but instead, I do other stuff and get a night's sleep. Next morning, voilà! The answers slide into my head like it was an Easy-Bake oven.
I'm pretty sure that's the principle behind letting our stories sit for 24 hours or so after we draft them. I'm very ready, immediately after finishing a first draft, to keep making changes/improvements for hours. It's fun! But if I start right away, I'm probably just spinning my wheels. Better to let it marinate some.
On my next visit to the text, the little sections that don't really belong in the story, that probably belong in some other story -- you know those little sections -- practically jump up and down, begging to be removed. The story I'm telling tonight spent some time with a passionate discussion of a human rights issue sitting right before the end. It might have worked. But in addition to being unstorylike in general, it kicked off with an anecdote that actually did flow from the whole preceding part but also threatened to derail the entire enterprise. (If it was this complicated to describe, imagine listening to it.)
And I realized, because I had enough time to, that in the interest of story length (I arbitrarily chose to make my stories no longer than 8 minutes), I'd omitted the actual end of the original narrative, the denouement if you will, because I got so passionate. Putting it back was an especially satisfying revision, and though I won't stop procrastinating probably ever, I hope to continue learning to be a more relaxed writer, momentum-wise.
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