I’m in the middle of a deep revision of my thesis novel right now.  I’m going scene by scene through the whole manuscript, checking voice, point of view, metaphor choices, et cetera.  I’m also allowing myself room to add detail and depth that might not have made it into the original draft.  The word count has already grown by six to eight percent.

The additions are good, opportunities I missed earlier to enrich conflicts and subplots, as well as make the setting clearer to the reader.  I find the whole process exciting.  I love this story, and I take joy in seeing it come to life right before my eyes.

And yet this morning when I sat down to start, fear froze my fingers.  My stomach started to sour and I stared at the words on the page, afraid to change them.  What if I was losing perspective?  I’ve been looking so hard at the bark on each tree, could I be sure I was still even in the right forest?  What if I was over-explaining?

What if I was ruining my story?

This is one reason I think deadlines are important.  I might have set the work aside for a day and taken a break.  If I had done that, I would have been giving into the fear, and who knows where that would have gone?

But I have a deadline to meet.  I want my thesis approved this year.  That means I want it to the second reader by November, October if possible.  To do that, I need time for a clean-up pass after I finish this revision.  I need this revision finished by the end of the month, but if I can pull it off, finishing by the twentieth would be ideal.  That means I need to revise at least ten pages each day, a little over three thousand words.  I don’t have time to take a day off.

Thinking about that deadline helped, gave me mental space I could use to slow down, relax and clear my head.  Then I looked at the page again and began revising.

Later that afternoon I wondered about the bout of fear.  I love my project, and I know the story well.  I understand my characters, what they want and why.  I understand my situations and how it’s all coming together.  So what happened?

I think it comes back to the thesis stare.  That’s my term for it – working on a project so deep and involving that you’re thinking about it even when you aren’t thinking about it.  You contemplate conflicts while you’re walking, find ways to improve a scene when you’re supposed to be paying attention during a meeting, and you don’t even notice what you’ve put on your lunch plate because you’re too busy trying to find a place in the timeline for one more scene with the romantic leads to ratchet that subplot up just a little bit further.

So when you have the thesis stare, you don’t know what you’re looking at because all you can see is your story.

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Submissions update:  The new issue of Soundings has my short story “Shooting Free Throws” in it.  Since I last posted, I have submitted pieces to The Pedestal and The Los Angeles Review.

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