Visions and Revisions Which a Minute Can Reverse - The Value of Self Editing

Since we have gotten an editor here at work, it has been enlightening, to say the least. To have one's writing edited, even technical writing, is an experience in the unknowability of the self. What I mean is, with writing specifically you write and write all day long (as a tech writer, or a journal keeper, a poet, a fiction writer) and no one sees your work. Perhaps people may look at it and review it, but generally you write and become used to what your words sound like and imagine that they mean something and might communicate some information to whoever reads them. My words are OK, I know how to write, I enjoy it, I can do it fairly well.

But until you get an editor, you don't know how much your writing is the product of habit, the result of writing the same way over and over for many years. You don't know how much your *style* simply consists of your habits, good and bad, that you've developed over the years. It's like walking, or sitting, or anything you do regularly and consistently: you tend to develop ways of doing these things and you repeat yourself. Often, these habits are not good, or, they simply become stale and old and boring. Bad posture. A slight lean to one side when you sit. Using the same verbs over and over.

When the editor here looks at my sentences - these little strings of symbols that identify ME and are a unique expression of my SOUL, goddammit! - and shreds and slices them with her bloody red ink pen, it's a shock. I realize how all these little linguistic habits and stylizations I had thought were pretty clear and decent, are actually stiff, unclear, wordy, redunant, bland, ineffectual, pedestrian, uninspiring.

Looking at your own writing is much like looking in the mirror - you see this person you know is you, but, the more you stare and examine this strange living being in the glass, quite foreign and downright creepy. Who IS that person, anyway? When an editor (or a psychologist) takes an honest and objective look at you, you get the opportunity of seeing yourself through the critical lense of of another. You are shown just how much of who you really are and what you do is a a jumbled collection of habits and repeated behaviors, mostly unconscious.

Much like being able to really understand and imagine what another person might be feeling, to elevate your consciousness to the level of Empathy, the editor (or psycholgist, who have now become "Life Coaches") enables you just enough glimpse into who you are to realize things you weren't even aware of:

"I did not KNOW I often made errors in subject-verb agreement."
"I did not know that when I eat at a restauant that I blow my nose on the linen napkin and leave it on the table and this may digust people."
"I did not know that I used a semicolon so often."
I did know KNOW that when people at work talk to me I hold my hands together and twist them nervously."

If you're lucky, after you recoil at this new picture of who you are, get over the realization that on a slight level you weren't who you though you were, then you might develop to a degree of empathy for yourself, and begin the process of making the changes you must if you want to grow and transcend the sometimes inextricable flow of entropy that engulfs us all as we go through life. Breaking down the unconscious Ritual de lo Habitual. I've quoted this chap (Mr Rilke) a thousand times before, but I must one more time: "You must change your life."