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A writing mentor was once horrified when I told her that I was used to writing and editing simultaneously. Her recommendation was for “vomit writing” (typing without stopping for anything [not even for correcting spelling errors!!!]) to come first. Then, only after everything that needed to be said was on the page, the editing could begin; for every hour of writing, she recommended 3 hours of editing.

My approach, after years of blogging, was to edit as I wrote, correcting every spelling error and reworking sentences until they said exactly what I wanted them to before moving on to the next one, and then doing a few final passes and tweaks before posting a piece online and moving on with my life. I didn’t have much time for more; writing was something I squeezed in during babies’ nap times and uni breaks. If there were any truly awful mistakes, I figured Alan would point them out, and I could rush back to the post to fix them.

I never took on the 1-hour-writing/3-hour-editing ratio — since leaving religion, I’ve found myself rebelling against anything that feels even remotely prescriptive — but what I took from this advice was that I needed to hold off on editing. I’ve found this idea helpful, in both my writing and my life. (It’s hard, though. I want to edit everything.)

Since 2017, I’ve been writing and collecting stories around common themes, which I hope together will (one day) make up a complete book, something memoir- or autofiction-esque. My goal is to finish the project, my “manuscript,”* and for it to feel like one whole work rather than a bunch of cobbled-together pieces.

I meet weekly with three writers, and read out bits of what I’ve written, and they tell me what works and what doesn’t work, what questions they’d like answered, what assumptions I may have made about what the reader already knows, ways to get myself unstuck (I am very regularly stuck).

It’s a vulnerable process, sharing writing with other people and asking them to critique it. It’s scary writing about real situations, and asking whether the emotion I felt when I wrote it - tears streaming, blowing my nose repeatedly - comes across in the words on the page. (The answer to this question has been a kind “No” on multiple occasions.) I love it. I look forward to this dose of honesty and care and solidarity every Friday. I’m making slow but steady progress as a result.

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Sometimes when I read things I’ve written in the past, I find myself laughing or nodding, and I think, “I can’t believe I wrote this!” and “I’m actually… pretty amazing???” And then at other times, I’m so deeply embarrassed as I read that I consider never writing a single thing ever again just in case it turns out to be one of those pieces that ends up possibly shaming a future version of me.

Sometimes, the embarrassment comes because I’ve changed. For example, now that I’m not a Christian, it’s cringey for me to read old blog posts which ended with a simple, “"I’ll trust God with this one!” As I read those pieces now, I find myself wishing I’d kept wrestling with the dissonance that was slowly nibbling at my innards rather than repeatedly choosing easy endings and moving on.

And sometimes, the embarrassment’s just because the writing’s bad. And sometimes the writing’s bad because I was experimenting, or sometimes it’s because I was writing in a way I thought I should write, and sometimes I can’t even articulate why it’s bad, it just feels off, and I don’t like it anymore.

As I’ve been working on my “manuscript,” I’ve thought about potential future embarrassment a lot. I want to keep growing and changing, and so it’s very likely that whatever I write now will one day embarrass me, just like now-me is often embarrassed by past-me’s writing. And what will happen if anyone outside of my Friday group reads it, and they have opinions, too, which might not be so gently and respectfully expressed?

My self-prescribed treatment for this worry is to blog again, but this time with a focus on editing less: I write quickly and I publish what I’ve written - with spelling and grammatical mistakes, and arguments that don’t quite hold together because I didn’t sit on them for a week considering how each paragraph flowed to the next, and endings that are more peter-out-y than profound - and… I survive it.

It’s exposure therapy. I’m teaching myself that though I’ll feel icky and uncomfortable for a few days about the spellos and the weak arguments and the boring endings, I can cope with icky and uncomfortable! Icky and uncomfortable won’t kill me, despite what my body still seems to believe! They, like all feelings, will pass. (And they may give me something else to write about later.)**

* I use inverted commas around “manuscript” because “manuscript” feels like a word only a writer would use about their project, and I’m not sure when one is allowed to call oneself a writer - is it when one is published by someone other than oneself? Is it simply when one writes, either for pleasure or for business? Inverted commas around “manuscript” help me feel like less of a fraud/wanker.

** Even now, I’m worried that I haven’t made this argument well enough for you to follow what I mean at all, and there’s a part of me wondering whether I should sit on this for a week and make sure it’s clear. And another part’s encouraging me to think of a better ending - maybe a joke! or something that will make you think, “Jeepers, she’s intelligent!” - before I hit Publish. Alas: I will be listening to Self, who knows that imperfection is our friend and wants us all to get on with our days.