This is what editing feels like.
You are alone in a dark room. Across the floor are the scattered pieces of three or four or five floor lamps. You don’t know how many. There are screws and bulbs and fixtures mixed together. You try not to panic as you feel your way across the floor in search of these pieces. It does not matter how many times you’ve done this exercise before. Each time you do it, it feels like the first. People tell you, you’ve done it before, you can do it again. But they don’t know what it feels like to be in the dark room searching blindly. Your work is meticulous. You must evaluate not only each piece, trying to discern its nature, but also how it relates to all of the other pieces. Most of the time, you feel as if your work is wrong. It’s a persistent feeling, that the path you’ve chosen,…
