Does anyone else find editing boring?
I watched a TED talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Positive Psychologist, on Flow – the secret of happiness.
Flow is the state you get in when you're really happy.
Everything just clicks, you lose yourself, hours pass like minutes. One poet describes
it as “opening a door that floats in the sky”. It’s when what you are doing
becomes worth doing for its own sake.
It reminded me of why I love writing. But this state feels
like almost a “magical” thing – how can we recreate it at will?
Mihaly did some research to work out what is going on
when people are in flow. He found out that people in flow are facing higher than
normal challenges, and feel they have higher than normal skills to deal with
them.
So – how does this help with editing?
Well. According to Mihaly and the diagram, I must either think the challenge of editing is too easy,
or I don’t feel I have the skills to deal with it.
Well… surely I’m not so arrogant to think it’s easy?
So, tomorrow night I’ll be reading up on how to edit a novel.
Ciao for now.
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