Life usually gives you pretty clear signals about when to stop doing something. When you cough, you stop smoking. When the light turns red, you stop moving. When the tissue appears free of skid marks, you stop wiping.
Writing is trickier if one has obsessive tendencies. Call it perfectionism (to be polite), OCD (to be clinical), or analness (to be Freudian). I have a hard time stopping. Even when I write a casual email, sometimes I read it three, four, five or more times before clicking that dreaded send button. It's scary because it's like farting. Once it's out, you can't suck it back.
Same thing with blogging, thus I find it hard to be prolific. I will often edit a post until my eyeballs begin to sizzle. When I hit publish, I usually end up regretting what I write anyway. That massive time consumption seems entirely irrational. I mean, I could be doing something else totes more useful, like reordering my Netflix queue to even out the genres or rearranging the cans in my pantry according to the expiration date.
A friend once said to me that
analness is good, cuz people like that keep planes from falling down.
True, though that kind of positive externality does not arise from my writing, or anything I've done in my life, for that matter.
I started working on my Morocco novel in 2011. The manuscript is largely done, yet I can't stop tinkering with it. Frequently, it's merely a tiny issue of word choice or punctuation - not necessarily wrong but I just want to change it because I want to change it. Stubborn I am. I know it won't move the needle, but I can't help myself. The worse part is that the book has already been formatted for both ebook and paperback, thus every edit necessitates revising two files. Furthermore, a change to the paperback file may ruin the typesetting for the rest of the chapter.
The title on the spine of my proof paperback was a bit off-center. Millimeters. Few people would notice it, and most who would probably would be cool with it. Chances are, no more than a handful of people will even see the paperback. And because I couldn't leave well enough alone, I just had to redo my paperback cover. That means I'll have to order yet another proof copy. More delay.
Weeks ago, I began proofreading my manuscript. Made several passes. Finally, I got to a point where I thought it was fairly error-free. Not perfect, but clean enough to put it out there without shaming my ancestors. Then I showed my partner a few paragraphs. She read them for seconds before glancing at me.
"You have a typo," she said, pointing to the first line of the second paragraph she read. "Read that sentence."
I did. Twice. "I don't see a problem," I said, perplexed. I wanted to tell her that, as I warned, she shouldn't have smoked that stale years-old weed.
"Read it again."
I again reread that one sentence, and finally noticed a missing word. "Oh," I said, feeling shocked, stupid, and embarrassed all at the same time. My grandfather must've been wincing in his grave. I wanted to yank the scalp off my skull.
I failed to spot the problem until the third time, and that was
after several proofreading passes and
after someone pointed out there was a mistake in that sentence. My mind had repeatedly filled in the missing word because I expected the sentence to read a certain way. I dizzied. If I extrapolate her experience to the entire manuscript, there must be hundreds of errors.
Obviously I am incompetent at this point. Moreover, the mere thought of reading my manuscript now nauseates me. I've read my manuscript so many times I lost count. Somewhere between fifty and eighty, I reckon. But there are still invisible specks on the paper.
So I keep wiping.
