Filling in the Seams

I have been building an addition on my house for a year, now. I framed it in, put in windows and doors, created rooms, wired and plumbed, and finally got to put on sheetrock. Closing it in made it really start to feel like a real house.
Only mudding and taping all the seams has taken forever. I just want to get done. Can’t we live in the rooms just like this? Of course not. It’s not finished. No one would accept conditions like this.

Mudding sheetrock is a lot like editing. First of all, it seems to take forever. I fill in gaps between the panels of gypsum. I round edges and crease corners. I smooth out rough spots. And then I go back and look at it with a critical eye and lo – cracks I thought I’d covered need another go over. But eventually I reach a point where it has to be “good enough.” I’m the only one who will ever notice that spot high in the stairwell wall, visible only in the direct beam of a halogen work light, where the corner dips a little too low.

So it is with my manuscript. I need to reach the point of “good enough” and let it go. Because I know I will always look at it and see the seams.

Kill Your Darlings

I thinned my carrots yesterday. I know some gardeners who don’t thin, and they’re always amazed by the size and productivity of my garden. “I put all that work into growing them,” they say. “I just can’t pull them out and kill them!” But you have to kill them. You have to murder your darlings if you want the biggest and best seedlings to produce to their full potential. To become marketable plants.

I’m in the editing stage for my latest manuscript right now, and there’s that phrase again - kill your darlings. “But I put so much effort into writing that perfect sentence!” Kill your darlings. Maybe I can pull it and transplant it somewhere else, but most likely it just needs to go onto the compost pile. The essential elements of it may end up in a manuscript next year, and I won’t even know it. The important thing is that I give the other sentences in my manuscript room to do their job.