Monday 15 July 2024
This week’s The Revision Diaries entry is incomplete; there’s only one journal entry—Thursday. Although this singular piece may suggest I wasn’t working on the revision, I was. In fact, I think I have finished revising not only BOOK 2 but the entire manuscript! I drove myself to finish the work of revision by this past weekend, and I did. Revision was an exhausting and demanding process, and this past week’s revision was especially so.
This time last year, I was determined to complete the first draft of the manuscript, and getting it done took an additional week. For me then, 15 July 2024 has symbolic meaning as a milestone.
I am happy for the writing (and revision) to be over. My Katyn experiences changed me in many ways, and writing (and revising) about them has also changed me. The book is about those changes.
I’m happy but also unsure what it means to be “finished”? Am I really? I plan to print out the entire manuscript later this week for one last run-through, looking for anything I may have not revised or corrected.
Soon I will embark on the next phase of writing this book!
Thursday 11 July 2024
Productive editorial session this morning. It’s almost noon, and I feel stunned. Working on the latter chapters of BOOK 2, I feel tired—which is a good thing because feeling exhausted means I accomplished something—but I also feel overwhelmed, like the editorial process is trauma-inducing. When I say I am cutting, I AM CUTTING. I am cutting because these chapters are tangents. They do not add anything directly to the Katyn story or more importantly my story. The parts I’m cutting now look to me as though they belong to an academic history manuscript, not a personal memoir. And those “historical” sounding parts aren’t about the history of the Katyn Massacres. These omitted sections are about the Russian Revolution, the Great Terror, and other events not necessarily about Katyn.
I know that these cuts are necessary, but I feel like I’m cutting myself, figurately speaking. At the time when I drafted BOOK 2, I believed with a strong conviction that these chapters were absolutely necessary. Oh, how two years from when I wrote BOOK 2 make a difference! “I need to say this because the reader won’t understand what I say later on.” Ugh.
When I still struggled to understand what kind of book I was writing—I knew I was writing a memoir but didn’t understand what it meant to write one—I wrote BOOK 2 when I emerged from a severe writer’s block spell. I was happy to write… and write a lot. My intention for BOOK 2 was it would serve as the manuscript’s Introduction—explaining everything. Well I did explain “everything,” but too much and too much about irrelevant things.
This is why I held off revising BOOK 2 until the very end of the revision process. I sensed doing so wouldn’t have been easy… as I am discovering. The cuts are necessary, but revision is an emotional experience, too.