Editing Wrong

My recently lack of progress has me more frustrated than usual. And it's all my own fault. What is worse than not editing because you're afraid of breaking something? 

Herpes. 

But in the world of a person who always has little time to write, editing hesitancy is high on that list, too. Whenever you sit down to do your initial writing, the ideas and conversations and scenes that flow out of you are sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes you feel driven to drink and sometimes you shake your head at the genius the world will realize you were once you have died of herpes.

When you edit, though, you are taking the product of all those sessions, good and bad, and potentially destroying it. By some miracle, in between bouts of alcoholism, you crafted a set of words that you determine might be worth sharing with another human being. You juuust need to move a few thousand words around first. 

But where to start? And if you do start, what if that is wrong? What if what you edit ends up worse than what you have before​? You could certainly create draft after draft to try and preserve the various versions. But who has time to read those? And what if not editing is wrong? Or what if what you think is right now, is wrong later? Or if the wrongs you create make the rights wrong and then you're righting the wrongs making another wrong? How can 355 wrongs make a right, when it doesn't work with two?!

Clearly, this is why writers drink. The insufferable presence of their own thoughts is too much to bear. What writers also do is craft wonderful, lifelike or fantastical stories that take our imaginations to places our bodies can never go. Or at least they would if they stop worrying about how other people are going to react so much. Stupid other people. Always ruining everything for everyone. 

Creating wonder, in my experience, is a process of discovery. I have to abandon the notion that whatever I made is "done." I may be done, but in my mind a story is always in a constant state of transition. That is because rather than my imagination alone, the process plays a part in creating the narrative. It is the risks I take, the things I try, the failures I cry about in the shower; all of those help build a stronger narrative. Even the faiures, when everything falls apart, you are creating because you find what you liked among the pieces and start building again, from that. 

The failures aren't so bad then because even if what I've written is slightly interesting, if it reads like shit, the only thing they'll think when I'm gone is how patient my family must have been living with a moron. It means that I need to push myself. So I need to continue to edit just as I continue to write, even if the story isn't going to work. I need to realize that failure and frustration are two different things. 

Pushing forward blindly is nice to consider, but it isn't a clear approach, a clear solution. However, if there is a solution, I don't know it. My guess is that the solution is hidden somewhere in between "You publish zero percent of the stories you don't finish" and "Your horrible failure will give you something to think about while you try again!" Until then, some of what I tell myself is this: 

1. Screw everybody. Seriously: up theirs. 

2. Creativity requires courage. You need to take risks in the story and outside of it. 

3. ...I forget 3. Whatever. 3 isn't important.   

4.(My) stories are more like clay or oil painting than sculpting, in that you work through your efforts to find the solution, rather than a more permanent process where the finished initial product is honed and refined.