Bibble

by Dana

Remember when you were a kid and you’d say a word over and over until it was meaningless?   “Bubble gum” is a good example; after a dozen repetitions, you could barely put the syllables in the right order, much less remember that they were representative of anything. 

There comes a point in the editorial process when your vision blurs, your brain shuts down, and every line of prose you’ve been shaping for days, months, years looks like “bibbble-bibble-bibble.”  The more you try to fix it, the more you’re convinced you’re unstitching everything that was ever good about the project, and things you were amused by or pleased with look grotesque and out of place. 

It’s not a good place to be. 

It comes with the territory.  It happens at least once a project for me, and in this case, size doesn’t matter:  short stories are just as vulnerable to this plague as novels.  I bet poems are even worse. 

What can you do?  If you’re not on deadline, the best thing to do is set it aside for a week.  And—or—get someone else to read it and give you some feedback.  I advise you to say something like “Can you look at this and tell me whether I should set the whole thing on fire and then, with its ashes still smoking, go walk the earth?”  That should let the friend (and in this particular situation, you should always call on friendly writing support) know exactly where you are and that you lack that most crucial of all a writer’s tools, perspective. 

If you are on deadline, or if everyone you would call on is up to their hipboots fighting their own deadlines and demons, it’s much worse.  You have to cowgirl up and take drastic action to get past this.  Here are a couple of suggestions:

1.  If you can’t set it aside for a week, set it aside for an hour, and then DO something.  Not just watch television or take a nap; you really need to actively distract yourself with something not writing.  Clean the bathroom.  Go to the gym.  Do the food shopping.  Chop wood.  Board a small pirate vessel.  Sometimes you can reboot your brain by using another part of it.

2.  Change the music you’re listening to.  Or if you work in silence, try taking your manuscript to a coffee shop or on the train or to the beach, some place where there will be some background noise.  Again, the idea is the same, to get your brain out of the rut it’s found its way into.  When it’s differently occupied, it has to work harder to do the editing, and hopefully, there’ll be less bandwidth for the self-doubt and bewilderment to creep in.

3.  Go to Imagination Land.  By which I don’t mean fantasize that Buffy or D’artagnan or Bullwinkle will swoop in with the cure for the mysterious ailment that is clouding your judgment or slay the evil wizard who has you under a spell, although…that’s not a bad idea, really.   What I was thinking of was to try and separate yourself from the emotional content of what you’ve put into the work:  Pretend you’re the editor of a fragile and promising writer whose work needs a tweak.  Nothing drastic.  Nothing vicious.  Just that judicious nudge.  This is hard to do, but sometimes, you can trick yourself into it. 

The important thing to remember is that this will pass, and in less time than you think possible, you’ll probably be friends with your story/novel/poem again.  And with a little more distance, you’ll remember why you fell in love in the first place.