It’s amazing how many times I can edit the same piece of writing. For the last five days, I’ve hunkered over Ganesh Ascends to Heaven, about a woman who kills an Indian pedestrian in the U.S. and goes to India to try to make sense of the man’s paintings and her own life. It’s one of the stories in my forthcoming collection, Immigrants (Creators Press, Fall 2023).

So I’ve started every morning re-reading the same 14 pages, shifting pieces of paragraphs back and forth–up and down the page, deleting words and putting them back in; deleting commas and putting them back in; going back to a file of an earlier draft to splice in a sentence I’d eliminated, all in the quest of trying to make the story sail more smoothly.

And the dirty truth: I couldn’t tell you with certainty whether what I’ve come up with is better than what I had before. But I think it is! At least–today–I like it a whole lot better!

I will say this: it absolutely helps me to take breaks from my writing, long breaks, where I can return to what I’ve written with my mind in a totally different place and assess the story as if I’m reading it, rather than writing it. I just have to hope that I don’t have too many “What Was I Thinking” moments that Christine Lavin totally nails in her very funny song.

The important thing to remember is that everything is changeable, but also to take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What I noticed on the initial read this round, having not looked at the story for a couple of months was a clunkiness to the writing–details that didn’t need to be there that slowed the story down. So, I was able to chop out 300 words, shortening the story by an entire page, with no essence lost.

And I noticed more sloppiness–places where I used the same verb or a weak verb, or too many instances of words like “that” or “just.” (And this was after spending a month last year on micro-editing the entire collection, focusing entirely on sentence structure and word choices.)

And it’s also after two rounds of editing by my publisher, who has been great at flagging larger contextual/developmental questions as well as clunky and ungrammatical phrases.

So the underlying moral of this story–perfection is elusive, like the graph going toward infinity. Yet, I feel energized pursuing it, getting closer and closer to that unreachable axis.

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