Revising Life

Thinking is easy.  Everybody does it--even, according to some research circles, people hooked up to life support.  The youngest of brains, perhaps even embryonic, exercises some type of thought, be it nothing more than fulfilling the overwhelming urge to place one's thumb snugly in one's mouth.

Thinking ain't that easy.  If it were, every single person on the planet would be a pro of Sphinx-like proportions.  Oracles everywhere, in every Minit Mart, at every stoplight.  Nope.  There's only me at the stoplight, forgetting I was supposed to turn there to pick up my kid, so I zoom across the interstate and head straight into the wriggling morass that is Bowling Green traffic on a rainy, post-time change, night.

Let me back up.  Thinking is easy.  We all do it, all day every day, as the saying goes.  Some of us even do it all night, every night.  It's the controlling of said thoughts, the using of them for good, that is the hard part.

Which gets us to the end result of most thinking:  communication.  Usually whatever is rattling around in the old brain eventually comes out the old mouth (or into the old writing).  And therein lies the rub.

I got an e-mail this week, from Coach.  It's one of those internet stories that's been rattling around for a while--you've probably seen it, if you go to church you may have even heard it.  First time around, it went in one ear and out the other.  This week, it stuck.

First point:  Watch your thoughts; they become words.

So simple.  So obvious.  All right already, move on.

Hold on a minute.  Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Yep.  They sure as heck do.  How many times have I walked out a door thinking "Did I really just say that?"  How many times have others replayed my own words back to me, only for me to react:  "I didn't say that" and they nod, sadly, knowingly:  "Yes, you did."

Well, I didn't mean to.  That wasn't what I meant.  That wasn't what I was thinking.  I meant this.  See?

I'm a writer, for Pete's sake.  If my reader/listener doesn't get what I mean the first time around, I need to hang it up.  And maybe, just maybe, that ugly, gnarly troll squirreled away in my brain shot a word or two out when I wasn't looking.  He does that sometimes, if I'm not careful.



Last night I started reading Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (heard her speak at Bowling Green High yesterday--fantastic!).  I can't stop hearing the voices of Lia, the narrator's, pathetic parents and the other pathetic adults in her life in my head.  Because I'm afraid those adult voices sound like my own.  Those adult words have been/are my own.  Which brings me back to this:

Watch my thoughts; they become words.

And I process this the only way I can:  Revise.  Revise.  Revise.

Take a big red pen to the thoughts.  Use a heavy black marker if necessary--prune and edit away, until the thoughts that are feeding the words that become the communication I share with the world does what I so want it to do:

Make a difference, a positive difference, in some teeny tiny way, every single day.

Note:  This post is the first in a five-part series.