Last Friday, my penultimate Friday newsletter as editor of Storyboard invited you to consider whether you’re the right next person for the role. (I wrote that sentence as a small insider wink at my treasured word-nerd friends out there — those who know what penultimate means and what it doesn’t. I also know the proper spelling of minuscule — no, it’s not mini-scule. But now I’m just being a snob. And, truth is, I usually have to look it up to be sure, because “mini” makes so much more sense. Mountain Editor tells me to think of it as related to “minute” — the one pronounced my-noot — but I always forget that.)
As I contemplated my pending un-tirement, as Mountain Editor calls it, I found myself thinking a lot about Joe Biden. Not just because he now has to figure out how to beat back one more threat of a government shutdown and how to sort out exploding pagers in the Middle East, but because he, too, will soon be taking a step he’s never taken in his long life of public service — one more to the side than forward, at least in the traditional career sense of forward.
I’d love to see Biden’s list of things that Must Get Done before January and talk to him about what he envisions beyond that. I’d love to know if, as he watches crowds swell with enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, he suffers twinges of envy: Hey, that’s my stage. Or if, rather, as he watches her get slathered in political toxins, he utters a little prayer of thanks: Been there. Done that. It’s someone else’s turn on the hot seat.
I wrote a long essay about that as a draft of last week’s newsletter. Or tried to. There’s something there I’m scratching at, but I haven’t yet found the heart of it. Maybe I’m too distracted by learning to play with the Merlin bird app, which I finally let myself download. But the piece wasn’t gelling. So I took some of my own advice from the writing workshop I was hosting at my cabin over the weekend: Sometimes we have to write to explore — to figure out what our story is — rather than as a finished product. Sometimes we have to write and write and write until we figure out what we are trying to say, and then, when we stumble onto it, we cut everything we wrote to get there.
Which is what I did. Was it painful to ditch those first 732 words? Yes.
Was it the right thing to do? Absolutely.
Will I have to write more to understand what’s scratching at me? Probably. Unless I realize it was just something to fuss over for a bit, but not worth more investment. Certainly not worth putting out in the world.
That was my opener when the writers gathered with their coffee and pastries and chaos Friday morning, after I hit SEND on the newsletter. We studied concrete things, like structure and the ladder of abstraction and the difference between dialogue and quotes. But we soon got sucked into the more emotional and psychological aspects of this writing life — what one of the women described as the misery she suffers through as payment for her joy of doing research.
Ayep.
