My cat is in energizer-bunny mode when she looks out a window these days—nose, face, back, and tail all atwitch with the thrum of what’s stirring under the melting snow. Then she runs to another window, and another. Something is happening out there she can’t get to but gosh darn it she needs to get there.
I feel that stirring, myself. With the change in light and warming temps, the allure of the spring melt is so energizing I’m still on a sunlight high at midnight.
I get a second wind after getting in bed, and blow through a few chapters in the book I’m reading, or dream up a new workshop for fiction writers who want tips on deep revision. Maybe writing about tunneling through the revision mines will help offset the brightness of the sunlight here above ground, I think to myself, while dark is staring at me from the window. But I keep seeing the sunlight of the day, even when my eyes finally close.
I’m no longer dragged down by winter’s drear but I’m still affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, it’s just taking on new character. Now I’m supercharged by the early spring’s brightness, buoying me to keep working, working, working. And it’s hard to put down my pen.
Is this what migrating birds feel—that push to keep moving? Or the chipmunks burrowing in thawed ground who can’t stop won’t stop. Well, then, I’m in good company.
This desire to work hard may be a familiar feeling to the revisers reading this. But so, too, might the classic S.A.D. of darkness and despair—that desire to push your project away. You may even experience a S.A.D. of revision season, a period when everything in your work is gloom and doom, and it seems like nothing will ever come together. Until it does.
That’s when the conditions change. When you’ve been writing in what might seem like the dark but the light is imperceptibly brighter. And without realizing the exact moment it happens, you’ve worked your way out of a corner, and turned another, and suddenly you’re moving and making and building and the story’s coming together and the revision’s truly working.
That’s because you’ve worked through the darkness, and didn’t stop. The darkness lifted in part because you broke through blocks and made room for the light at the end of the tunnel. When you persist, when you stay attentive and keep the pen moving, the writing moves forward and you do too. It’s is simple and as hard as that.
Soon, you’ll be done—really done—and ready to start a new draft. And the next phase is upon you. Either another revision pass, or new work. It’s almost spring after all. And you’re a writer. Every ending invites you to begin again.