Do not bedevil me, Revision!

But, alas, it does. I tried to vlog about this the other day but couldn't upload it to youtube so I've mostly given up. At this rate I might as well write a bit about these troubles here if I haven't already.

While I don't mind editing other people's work--I rather enjoy it, in fact--my own efforts at revision overwhelm me.

I don't know how to edit myself, I guess. It scares me. I sit down and look at the draft and get sucked right back into the details and self-recriminating judgments. "This is all crap!", and such.

With other people, I don't have such trouble finding "the big picture" and helping shape the piece to suit it, but I can't seem to with my own efforts. Perhaps it's too personal, perhaps I'm too inexperienced, perhaps I suck at turning the same objective but curious eye on myself that I grant others.

Probably, too, I expect too much of the (rough) draft I'm working on. That is, I demand certain things--order, organization to name two--that simply aren't there yet, but since I'm "requiring" them in order to be able to edit, I struggle badly to edit.

Another problem is "fancying" things. I get distracted from sorting out that whole big picture/organization thing as I come upon lines or phrases or bits I like. I also seem to have a hard time "risking" getting rid of them even if it means sorting out the piece and making sense of it as a whole. Sentimental? Mebbe. >.<

I'm gonna try something different today. I've heard one method of organizing is to write a draft and then make an outline of it and then see how you'd like that outline to be different and make changes accordingly. (Sometimes I've heard that you make an outline first, too, and then compare them. Kinda same thing...)

The trouble with distilling an outline from this draft is that because of its disorder there aren't exactly points that could be extracted and formed into an outline.... So maybe I should, having done what I can to look over what I have perhaps, draw up an outline of what I'd like, and then use what I have to fill in those gaps? That kinda makes sense, right?

Oh well. Either way, whichever way, it's worth trying. It's at least something...versus putting it off again as I have all week. Yeah. This sounds better.