editing

My few weeks of nothing is coming to a close, as I ready for a cross country drive to Arizona, where I'll be doing a primary care rotation for a month. Probably because my mind is preparing and no longer in cruise control, I've come to the realization that these past weeks were more editing and maintenance than writing and moving forward.

In one respect, I enjoyed that a lot. Often I relish editing someone else's words more than forming my own. It's less taxing in a lot of ways that writing can be frustrating, and it can also be its own sort of challenge, as I found anew while working with the patient for my project on her personal story. On first read, you might think that it required a lot of reworking, both structurally and textually. In terms of structure, it wasn't something I could shape just by removing repetitions and grouping similar details. That's the first step, but just a concrete one, and if anything solid is to come from that, I had to understand what the author wanted to say. The same goes for nuances of text, choosing words etc. But in terms of that, I found it a really interesting and satisfying endeavor to keep her words while trying to manipulate the presentation of the words to better convey what she wanted. Again, on first read the story would be taken as undeveloped in terms of style, but I found myself falling in love with her simple narration, very much a mental print of memories as they came to her. I liked the sense that this was her, and didn't feel compelled use or add different words, which would change this sense.

Figuring out what she wanted of course was the most important, and this isn't straightforward. I can most definitely relate to writing without consciously knowing my purpose. So this grew out of a lot of conversation, questions, and reading versions of the story as things were concretely refined. And in those, I found that her words supplied both structure and text, and overall purpose. Everything added was added in the raw form that she gave it, and then it was a matter of placement and detail.

She had begun the story all because of the fact that she had known this person, and she ended it feeling that she hadn't really known the person at all. To go through that process with her and be able to document and express that process, it made me feel again how natural it is to want to shape narratives, how complex and fulfilling the effort can be.

It was also a pleasure to speak to someone who has experienced worlds and lands so vastly different from the ones she occupies now; to see in one person how much can be had in a life. It makes me feel less caught up in doing the things I wanted to do during these weeks, makes me feel all right with letting experiences happen and unfold as they come, to feel less lame for expending energy on simply maintaining the things in my life that take me places without actually going any place (car, camera, body). Just continuing can bring newness and fullness, and even though I've done almost no writing at all in this period, maybe sometime in the near future my words will come as simply and clearly as hers.