Revising Your Life

It's that time again. That bleak, cloudy moment when you realize that there are people who live in warm sunny places who are picking oranges from trees while you gaze at the lackluster yard standing shamefully naked without a covering of snow (the yard, not you, I hope). The broken remains of the perennials you were too busy to cut back in November hunch weakly as great, fat brown squirrels tear through the garden pursued by spry red squirrels less than half their size. The dog comes in with mud on her feet—MUD!—when you should by rights be slipping down the driveway on packed ice while trying to bring the groceries in the house. You come to acknowledge the insidious fact that this winter has looked more like March, the ugliest month of the year, than it has like the normally enchanting January of memory.

I think we're all fighting a low-grade depression in our house right now.

It is in this soul-crushing grayness that I find myself revising my recently finished novel (which, incidentally, takes place in the summer . . . how cruel). I go through chapter by chapter, line by line, word by word, cutting out the fat, culling the phrases that hold the story back, choosing a more precise or less cliche word here and there. I'm trying not to allow myself indulgences—favorite sentences that don't work very hard—and I begin to see that revising a manuscript is rather like revising the contents of your home or the way you spend your time.

There are things you just don't need that you hold on to for no more reason than a bit of sentimentality or potential usefulness in some far off future that will never really come. There are things you do for no more reason than they seem amusing or you feel you need to fill some time, but in reality you could be doing something much more useful, like keeping up with the laundry or calling your sister just to chat.

So once I'm done savaging my manuscript with red pen, I may turn my attention and my revision skills to my life. I realize that the beginning of January is a more traditional time for such activities, but I've been so fiendishly busy with work and sewing and exercise avoidance that I only now find myself mentally capable of such considerations.

But what should go? What should stay? I'm seriously contemplating making use of that old practice of assigning to each day a chore: laundry on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, grocery shopping on Wednesday, mending on Thursday, tidying the house on Friday, deeper house cleaning on Saturday, resting on Sunday. Until there are serious outdoor chores to work on in the Spring, I believe this could be a workable plan. To kick it off, I may take a few days off work after the catalog is at the printer in order to de-clutter and rid the house of dead weight. I have the sudden urge to find beautiful empty space and then protect it from encroaching hordes of stuff. I am feeling penned in on all sides (especially in my office) by creeping piles of stuff that needs shelving or filing or pitching. Mentally I feel rather the same.