A New Set Of Eyes

After the big garage sale weekend, I still have a house to sell. Admittedly, it's got a lot less stuff in it, but still. I worked upstairs today, moving things around to make the spare room look not so spare. Pat's stuff is all packed up in the basement, but she's now going through the kitchen and separating out her things there. We've been living together for four years now, so a lot of our stuff has co-mingled. But now I'm starting to look at the house with a new set of eyes, as if I were seeing it for the first time. I'm trying to remember what about the house appealed to me in the first place and play that up. Which I can now do, since the clutter is gone.

So the basement has been cleared out, and by today, when the next potential buyers come through, Pat may have enough stuff packed so her room will look organized. It's been a challenge to trim the fat from the house, but it feels really good to know that now everything I am left with has a purpose and a reason for me transporting it hundreds of miles.

Which, of course, got me to thinking about my editing process. Clearing the house has been so similar to what I go through in my writing, it's almost eerie. In the months it takes me to write a first draft, I add things in along the way, some good, some brilliant, some really bad. I leave it all in, carting it around with me, until it's time to clean things up, to edit my messy first draft. Just as I've gone room by room through the house, paring things down, I do so with my draft. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, I start cleaning, tightening, and making certain everything I keep has a purpose, a reason for being in the book. Then I'll let my beta readers take a look at it with their fresh eyes.

My rule of thumb for deciding whether to keep something or dispose of it in the house has been if I had touched it in the past eight years or not, the length of time I've lived here. It amazed me to see the moving stickers from my previous move still on way too much stuff. Which means, it hadn't been used since I've been here. As I work through my draft, I try to apply the same logic. I cut out the things that don't work, that aren't needed. Lines that sound wonky either need to be kicked to the curb or cleaned up.

Look out, wonky wordage. I'm here to take you down.