The Fear is the reason most people do not take great leaps of change in order to accomplish something they may have always wanted to do. I've never known anyone who didn't know what The Fear was, but just in case you're one of those lucky few, there's the definition.
The Fear can be one of the great motivating forces in the creative process as it plays off the dread of an impending deadline. The weight of time and inexorable consequences press heavier and heavier until, in a miraculous burst, one accomplishes the necessary either just in the nick of time or shortly after the deadline has passed. I personally know several people who rely on the infallibility of The Fear to get anything done at all. However, for me, The Fear is overshadowed by one greater force: The Problem.
The Problem for me takes a very simple form of an individual residing in my brain (not in the schizophrenic way) called The Editor. One may be tempted to think I could have condensed The Problem and The Editor into one and the same and thereby saved the reader from overexposure to excessive capitalization, but this is not the case.
The Editor is a remarkable part of my brain that I rely on more than almost anything. She is constantly active: the first to rise; the last to rest. When I walk into the grocery store and see a banner printing "partner's in the community" in giant letters, she is the one who fully arrests my pace to effect a face-palm while Brian tugs on my arm to get me out of traffic. When we watch a movie, she is the one incessantly critiquing the plotholes, ineffective character buildup, and sloppy emotional resolution. She is the reason I hate Comic Sans and the reason I post in a serif font. The Editor is relentless, and that is never a problem until it comes to my own writing.
Because I am aware of the issues that plague most stories, essays, movies, books, or basic conversations (yes, conversations can be and are often plagued by issues), I am under extraordinary pressure to create something free from the common mistakes. The Editor reminds me of this expectation every moment of the composition. Were she to be an actual person, Brian would shoot her on sight. As it is, I think he wishes he could surgically remove her from my brain. But he can't. And so she edits on.
Every sentence I write is reviewed a minimum of three times by The Editor before it makes in on the page. Once down, she reads it a further two times before I am allowed to continue on to the next sentence. A mathematically inclined person may at this point want to calculate the essay in its entirety. If you are such a person, let me know what numerical value you find when you finish. Even when I move on to the next sentence, that is not the end of the revision. The Editor must reread the sentence to evaluate its harmony with the sentences nearby. Do the thoughts flow smoothly from one full stop to the next? Is the parallel structure of the ideas maintained without being distracting? How jarring are the paragraph breaks? Are those too frequent? Are those too infrequent? Is there a chance I could be losing the reader by this point? This revision takes a minimum of four reads.
Those are just the broad sweeping questions that every sentence must pass before The Editor allows it to remain in the essay. Each word is further critiqued to assess its value and relative location in the piece. Has the word been used within the last seven sentences? Would another word better capture the meaning? or better paint the picture? What other meanings could a reader mistakenly draw from my use of this verb? Does this adjective really add to the piece or is it just cluttering up the essay? Why am I using such a common noun when there exist better, more descriptive and exquisite ones to be employed? How prolific are the prepositions? A word-focused read only takes about two passes, since words are like the large chunks of food that make up a stew. If there is a clove of garlic in your pot when there should be a potato, it is an obvious and simple thing to rectify.
This does not even include the mechanical edit. In the fifth paragraph second sentence, does the punctuation distract the reader? Ought the phrases to have been split into free-standing sentences? Is there consistent subject-verb agreement? Have I switched tenses? One entire read is dedicated solely to comma evaluation. Another for spelling. What am I supposed to do about the word "plothole"? A seven-minute excursion to consult three dictionaries and Wikipedia reveal that neither "plothole" nor "plot hole" appear in any dictionary and Wikipedia lists "plot hole" first and "plothole" as the "or" spelling. Traditionally an editor will choose to use the first listed spelling as that generally reflects mainstream usage. But The Editor knows that "plothole" is in meaning tightly tied to the word "pothole" and should therefore be treated as a single word and not separated. She chooses to leave "plotholes" in paragraph five at the expense of having to see the red squiggly underlining appear now six times because Google does not recognize "plothole" as a word. Oh. Now seven red squiggly underlines.
I will never be able to fully articulate everything The Editor does as I write. The primary reason being that by the very act of trying to write what she is doing, I am compounding on her activity because she simply must edit everything I'm writing. There comes a point when The Editor is a problem, and today I am awarding her the title of The Problem.
By starting a blog, I dedicated myself to writing at minimum an essay a week. This may even increase to twice a week because lately I've had a creative spurt and want to post more. One problem is that The Editor, by nature of what she does, requires more time than I allow to ensure that an essay is passing her guidelines before I post it. And an essay that is imperfect irritates her like a sharp rock in one's shoe when one is running a marathon. It's worse than that because any runner would immediately stop to remove the rock, but an imperfect essay is not so simple. If it were left to The Editor, I would only post near-perfect pieces. I do not have time to make every piece near-perfect. And in fact, I doubt any one of my (very few) readers is expecting near-perfection. This is The Problem. The Problem is that The Editor cannot accept that things do not need to be even half-perfect.
This week in preparation for posting today, I wrote the beginning paragraphs to nine separate essays. Each one, one after the other, was set aside because "it wasn't going where I wanted it to go," "I didn't have a well-formed ending," "the middle was wandering too much," "the idea isn't quite right," or the all-encompassing "there's something wrong with it just now, and I'm not sure how to fix it yet." After setting aside nine new ideas, I reviewed four half-worked essays. Each was closed for similar reasons and put aside. Following a review of over a dozen other ideas that I have noted in various places, I went to the pool with a notebook and came up with five more ideas. These each made it about two sentences before The Editor chose to set them aside with the others. This is The Problem.
Brian has a solution for The Problem. Brian is a Marine. Brian has a Marine's solution to a writer's problem. Would you like to know Brian's solution? I wish I could deliver it just the way he does. He listens to me discuss my difficulties for about seventy-seven seconds and then takes me firmly by the shoulders, looks me directly and Marine-ly in the eyes and says─
"Write the damn essay."
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