I am editing. Even though I’m a vegetarian and I don’t fish (or eat it), I do liken editing a book to fishing. The actual editing is the process of reeling in a fish you’ve hooked. At some point (today, for me), you land the fish. The problem is, the fish is much, much bigger than you expected. And it’s very much alive and extremely floppy. It thrashes around on the ground, gasping and trying to get away from you. It’s too big to pick up and if you don’t stay after it, the fish will get back into the water and swim away. So you find yourself trying to drag this fish further from the water and wrestle it into submission (cutting, editing, revising). What you really need (and this is the part of the analogy that really bugs me because I could never do this to a real fish), is a big stone to whack it on the head and make the damn thing lie still for a bit while you examine it. But it won’t. It just flops around. You think about cutting its head off (backstory), but it’s got a beautiful, finely crafted head. You consider lopping off its tail, but then it would just end without coming to a nice conclusion, which doesn’t work either.

If anyone knows how to land this fish, I’d love to hear it. In the meantime, I’m going for a walk to the post office in hopes that the Enchanted Forest will clear my mind.