My Own Good Advice For Writers Part 5

My last post has now been edited, and corrections made. The aftermath of the big yard sale was a whirl wind of catching up on my usual weekend chores, getting ready for the week ahead, and trying to find just a smidgen of down time in which to lie on the couch like a beached whale and maybe read a book or watch a good movie. Sunday went by so fast I hardly knew it had arrived.

Through out that whole day I percolated on my after-the-yard-sale article. I danced to and fro with it, waltzing with words, kicking up my heels with concepts and generally flouncing around with various funny thoughts about the whole affair.

I just couldn’t seem to nail it down, and I really didn’t feel like writing it just yet. Now, I’ve been one of those artistically inclined individuals my whole life, and as a teenager I tested the waters of “artistic temper -mentality” – there were times I just was not in the mood to get the creative juices to gush. It gave me an aura of artistic regality, but it just didn’t lend its self to being a really great artist. There were too many reasons to say I’m not in the mood. I finally gave it up, and for years now I’ve been a “just do it” kinda gal.

If it’s on the schedule, I finish the project. So by Monday I was gnawing at the bit to get my percolating into a post and publish it for my loyal readers. I’m really working on my ability to write on demand and produce enough really good articles to fill a spot in a weekly publication, you know, so when the New York Times comes a calling I can say yes to a hefty contract for a weekly column. Then I can take my lap top, fly to Tahiti and work.

Any Hoo- I glued my butt to the chair Monday morning with a time frame of about a hour. My day job was waiting and I just knew if I didn’t get that post posted, I would be thinking about it the whole afternoon. I “Just did it”, and finished up 15 minutes before I was due at my day job. I really didn’t have much time to do any editing. I did run the spell check. Feeling like a pro- I sauntered off to work, knowing my mind was free from worry. I made my self imposed deadline; I was on my way to being a productive member of the authors’ society.

Not long after, the article and its contents started scratching at my mind. OH! I realized I had forgotten to say something important. Then my mind started scratching faster, like a dog with fleas. Should have added this to that paragraph? Did I intersperse past tense with present tense? (a common mistake for me) Did I tell the entire tale in first person or did my voice waver from paragraph to paragraph, first person to observer? Did I miss a comma? Did the spell check say yes to putt when I meant put? Did I mistakenly conjugate my adjectives?

Pretty soon my mind had scratched itself into a frenzy and I was dancing around with my article while I was trying to do my day job. This is very distracting. I kept praying to the Patron Saint of Writers that no one from The New Yorker was checking out my sub-par post. I was wishing my regular readers would be so busy at work they did not even three minutes of their boss’s time to check out my latest post. I couldn’t wait to get back to the computer and fix my common mistakes, left hanging for the entire world to see because I wanted to fulfill my obligation as a serious series writer and post on a regular basis!

So my own good advice for writers is this- Always polish before you publish. Otherwise you might end up like yours truly, with a mind scratching and dancing and percolating all over the place, while your half baked post is fluttering in the breeze for all to see like a pair of underwear on a clothes line.