I can change me

I am working through a big revision of a novel with a concept I love but is somehow inexplicably full of crap plot and character development. I suppose this happens because I write in a free-flowing way and I don't know what is going to happen next, and so a lot of the time (sadly) what happens next is crap. And then later I assume I will be smart enough to fix it up, see what works and what doesn't, and then make it all shiny and new.

Now, this can sometimes be painful. Mostly when I believe that I don't have what it takes to fix the manuscript. So painful I want to quit and just rock back and forth in a quiet room and never think about being a writer again. So painful I consider other career choices. So painful I think that the horribleness of my writing must be bleeding into my horribleness as a person and that nothing in my life is right.

But I think about this sign a friend of mine has up in her office. It says, basically, that I am me and I get to choose the parts of me that I want to have be me. I can reject the parts that I don't like and add new parts that I do like. I am in charge of who I am.

Of course, this isn't true if one takes it too far. There are some things that we can't simply shrug off and say--I don't like that. If you have a disease, you can't just cut it out. You can't just make yourself have gifts that you don't have. But it is largely true, and perhaps it become more true, the more true that we make it by living it.

On good days, like today, I look at my manuscript and think, of course I can fix this. It's just cutting here and there, and adding here and there, and making sure it's all good. It doesn't have to be painful at all. But then again, the manuscript isn't "me" when I can think like a professional. Maybe it would be useful to somehow get distance from myself and think of whatever things need to be chopped off in myself as "other."

Just thinking.