Should I Keep Revising This Or Nah?: A Flow Chart

transcript:

I've decided to include an audio letter to go along with my "Should I Do Whatever or Nah?" series of Instagram posts. The rule of this challenge is I'm not allowed to pause or stop recording or fix anything - it's just going to go online as is. So that's what we're doing. I just want to explain this in my voice.

This iteration is called "Should I Keep Revising This or Not?" If you've seen it, essentially the flowchart goes something like: Hey, you should probably read it out loud. If you haven't revised it yet at all, you should probably revise it. You should probably put it away for a little while.

But then at the end, I ask: Has anyone else read it? And do they like it? And the answer to that is - it doesn't really matter. Do you like it?

The final slide asks: When you close your eyes, do you feel deeply within yourself that it's truly done in an almost metaphysical way? That were you to move or change a single word, it would be like altering something already finished? That the music of it would sound off-key forever? That even if it were possible to improve it somehow with further changes, to do so would be harmful to its wholeness, its complete imperfectness? If no, then keep revising. If yes, then cool - send it out.

But I realized after I made this chart that I actually left out a particular situation: if you are just beginning and you are working on a piece, and you keep working and working on it and it just is not meeting your own standards yet, that's okay. You should move on and write something else. The reason for that is I think everyone should give themselves a little cocoon period at the beginning, because it's going to take a while for your capabilities to line up with your taste, and you're not going to reach your own happiness about a piece maybe for a while.

You've got to be a little bit disappointed, and then you write something new. Or in my case, I was really happy with the poems I wrote for a day, and then I would write another poem and realize how bad my previous poem was. So I would give yourself at least a year to just operate in that space.

But once you get to the place where you're actively trying to send out work and stuff, if you reach a point with something where it just feels like it's set - it's like Jell-O. At a certain point, you've got to stop stirring it (I haven't made Jell-O in many years). You've got to stop, and at a certain point, a thing could be technically improved, but then it wouldn't be itself anymore.

So tune into how you feel about your writing. That's my advice. That's my flowchart of the day.