One thing I always look forward to doing as far as “back-to-school” shopping goes (gosh, I feel old just saying that) is buying new journals.

For academic course journals, I’m a fan of the trusty old Composition Book. I love the contrast of the dark binding with the busy rorschach-esque splatter pattern. Like a nice proper note jotter with a crazy side. Nowadays, these journals can be found in many colors besides black and white. This is mainly a plus because I happen to have a strange, synesthetic color-coded system when it comes to class notebooks. Here’s what it is: when I get my class list for the semester and I read each course title, a color immediately appears in my brain and gets paired with specific said title. So for example, this semester at VCFA, I am taking:

• Modules (made up of several 3-week intensive cross-genre workshops and seminars, built around common themes, and taught by various faculty members)
• Forms (exploring various written work and films critically and creatively, as well as participating in in-class writing exercises)
• Publishing & Fieldwork (Gaining professional experience editing literary mags, interviewing writers, editors, agents, and investigating publishing endeavors and arts-related careers)
• Professional Development (Airtime for practical literary matters, formatted as Q&A, generative & practice-based exercises, and discussion about professional trajectories)

Naturally in my head, the color-coding ended up like this:

• Modules: blue and yellow
• Forms: green
• Publishing: red
• PD: traditional black and white

So now, I have five lovely new journals for the semester—my own mini writing rainbow. And with no doubt, they will fill up with ink pretty darn quick.

Now on the other hand, non-academic journals are a different story. I love blank books. At bookstores, I enjoy a good paw-through of the section with diaries and sketchbooks and planners. I love the crispness of blank white pages and the texture of the unwrinkled cover and the bound book spines you have to crack open. In fact, I have a collection of them, buried somewhere under my bed, all acquired over several years. Some I have bought myself and others have been given to me.

Several (as in most) of these books are still blank.

Why is this? I think it’s that there are too many possibilities of what to put on that first page. I not only worry that my handwriting isn’t good enough or that I’ll use the wrong kind of pen, I tend to think about the purpose of the journal. Instead of taking it page by page, I think of the journal as a whole. As a kind of self-contained novel in itself.This might come from a sense of nostalgia for the types of journals Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf would have kept. These books of theirs have become artifacts of their lives. That sort of significance weighing on one’s private diary is enough intimidation on its own.

The thing is, I actually really love writing by hand. I find typing easier, but I love the act of putting ink to paper. I like not having to follow lines, which is why I prefer unlined journals to lined ones. I tend to write in blocks, add arrows and marginal doodles, and practice unique hand-drawn fonts. In a way, my written journals isn’t necessarily about the substance; instead it’s more about the aesthetic of the page.

Blogging seems easier to me, but perhaps it is just a different writing creature of its own. Serving a unique purpose that paper can’t provide for me. Maybe it’s easier because websites are developed without any lines. Maybe because there is an innate ability to work “undercover” from behind the screen. One can erase a word and retry a thousand times and no one would know the better. Hell, you could even delete an entire blog post if you so desired. Any post can be the last post. Each post is separate and yet still connected by a thin digital thread.

And yet, I’m still drawn to the paper journal. Because I love to feel their weight in my hands. Because they are a type of documentation with a lifetime guarantee stamp of permanence. Because it’s hard to color-code a class title by blog posts.

In the past few days, I’ve been doing lots of revision to two of my newest short stories, and it’s hard for me to gauge how the process is going.

Revisionland is a place I really learned how to navigate while I was a student at University of Michigan. I had the amazing experience to take a one-on-one writing “tutorial” with my professor, Laura Thomas, where each week, we’d meet in her office and I’d alternate between crafting a new piece or editing an older draft. I came to trust Laura’s eye for proper story arcs, improvements to character development, voice inconsistencies, and minor grammatical proofreading. My first-draft writing style tends toward the overwriting than the underwriting. Which is great in some ways because I have more to work with. The catch is that there’s often TOO much that is unnecessary to the central plot and there’s little I hate more than killing my linguistic darlings. Before I met Laura, the revision process looked to me a bit like the precipice of a giant roller coaster, where all you can see is open sky and a suspended track and you pray to whatever’s out there that there is track attached to the other side of the bell curve and that you’ve said “I love you” to all who care for you deeply in case you don’t make it. For the three years I spent with Laura as my own personal editor, I felt like I figured it out. I knew what to look for when I read back through my own drafts. I knew how to expand, how to cut, how to be ruthless, how to rephrase, and how to add details that progressed the story and didn’t distract the reader. I felt like I could release my grip on the roller coaster’s safety bar and raise my hands up high.

Now that I’ve been out of school for a year without my own personal beta reader and editor, I’ve had to fill that role myself and I feel like I’ve had to reteach myself everything. Which is funny because I don’t feel that way at all when I read other people’s work. I’ve been part of workshops in the past year and have received gracious compliments on the feedback I’ve given to others. In fact, I have many writing buddies who seek me out to read their early drafts and cover letters. And yet, I have so much difficulty looking at my own writing with those same critical eyes. It must be something about the distance (or lack of distance) we have to our own writing. We can justify every single word on the page and bicker with ourselves about why we put it there and why we HAVE to keep it. And all too often, we give in to our persuasive word hoarder part of the brain.

Another tricky part about self-editing is knowing when you are done editing. In contrast, when I paint, I can see and feel when something is done. It’s all there, on a neatly contained canvas, so I can see it all at once and acknowledge that yes, this project is finished, it is complete. But it’s so much harder when you have thousands of words, spread upon a number of loose pages, and you have to look at each detail piece by piece. It’s as if you had a book, but printed on each page you have a whole lot of white space and one single puzzle piece to a 1,000 piece puzzle. You must flip to each separate page to discern the piece. How do you know when all pieces are accounted for and the puzzle becomes an intelligible image, not just clusters of colored cardboard shapes? Ahh, the great mysteries of art-making (but isn’t it these mysteries, these challenges, that keep us at this work we love?)

This is what my counter looks like right now:

I know I am not the only one who struggles with editing, which is why I’m determined to tackle it head on. This is what seems to work for me:

• Printing out all of the pages of the story so I can see them clearly and all at once.
• Lay them out on a large table or the floor.
• Use your favorite editing pen (mine is a PaperMate Flair M Felt Tip in Purple)
• Read through each page out loud. Mark phrases that are too wordy, hard to pronounce, or don’t seem to convey what you intended.
• Pretend it’s someone else’s piece. If you hate criticizing your own, take on a new identity for this task!
• Just as if you were marking up the margins of your favorite book, write anything that comes to mind. Stream of consciousness, questions, musings, doodles, etc. The more you mark up and get down on paper, the better your next edits will be. Unclog your mind while editing. That’s where the anxiety lies, I’ve found: when you are trying to store too many things in your brain because you are ashamed to write them down. Remember: these edits are for YOU and your eyes only.

I’m curious as to what other people do to help them triumph over the editing hump and proceed through Revisionland unscathed? Leave a note in the comments!