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And again, repeat

3/15/2025

And, repeat.
   There’s something I’ve been doing over and over again for the last four years. It may sound absolutely tedious to you, Furthermore, given the creative and curious sort of person you know me to be, you probably wonder whatever could motivate me to such a thing.
   So, now are you curious?
   It’s editing the novel I hope to soon publish.
   I’m up to two dozen rounds of editing now, continuing to polish every sentence so that when you read it you’ll never see a single sentence there. You’ll see characters, you’ll witness compelling circumstances, you’ll find insight into human nature … and you might even discover something of yourself.
   Editing is a reiterative process. Every edit bootstraps the novel up to a more polished level, each step enabling the next. Progressively the text becomes clearer, more engaging, more meaningful. While I might be attending to different writerly things, I’m constantly asking myself the question how can I make this better for my reader?
   Reiterative processes are different than linear ones. A linear process progresses straight through to get itself done. Writing the first draft of a novel is linear. There’s a starting point moving to an end point. Some authors know where they are going before they begin, writing to their climax. Perhaps they’ll follow a genre template along the way. I never do. I follow my characters as their thoughts and actions lead them progressively toward a different set of circumstances, one that will allow the reader to be content in leaving them there. But either way, there’s a start to the story and a finish. If I write well enough the reader will keep turning the pages to the very end.
   And while the flow of plot and the realism of the characters seem like what the story is about, it’s not. The story is about what you as the reader feel along the way. As an author I hope you will feel curious, that you will have moments of sadness and disgust and celebration and apprehension, and, ultimately a sense of completeness at the end. I hope that you might understand the people around you and yourself a bit better because you have read. That is why I write.
   To get there I need to keep going back through it to make sure that nothing glitches up along the way. I need to edit well so you will feel deeply and self-reflect knowingly.

I had the privilege of engaging another reiterative process throughout my four decades as a psychotherapist. My clients and I repeatedly moved through their life stories: things that happened years ago, things that happened just days ago, things that they were just realizing now. We would take repeated passes, allowing ourselves to re-experience the moments of sadness, disgust, celebration, contentment, apprehension and terror embedded in those stories.
   Eventually, we came to that satisfactory place where we could end.
   Each session was an Again, repeat. Doing it well wasn’t tedious, it was circling deeper into the humanness of the client: who they were as a person and how they could carry on being that person with sanity and wellness.
   This wasn’t the way I was supposed to do it. My training and the prevailing professional model was the medical, linear one: diagnose and treat. Until you had the right diagnosis you wouldn’t know what you were supposed to treat. First things first.
   I never really got the knack of doing psychotherapy that way. Certainly, I trained on linear models of treatment for mental health conditions. However, my core in doing the work was that reiterative process of being with the struggling and distressed person, gradually having stressful matters become more clear, more resolved.
   Part way through my career I realized something vital to the process: from my very first moment with a client I could ease suffering and help the client to cope. I could do so in the way I attended to the client, felt and expressed my compassion for their suffering, put in the hard work of understanding. The easing came through in my tone of voice, the dance of eye contact, the simple words I used from their vocabulary rather than the complicated ones from mine.
   It was a both things first.
   As I progressed into applying the psychological theories and therapy maneuvers I progressively deepened my understanding of the client: their values, their world views, their intentions for their lives, their relationship needs. What I continued to learn about them would make the therapy increasingly individualized and effective. Never by the book, always beside the human.
   This progressive movement toward wellness was a both things yet again. And, again.
   And so you see, the two reiterative processes are the same. Each editing pass and each psychotherapy session circles deeper in making sense, feeling with, and coming to a place of resolution.

But there’s a key to how insuring the reiterative process doesn’t become tedious. Let me illustrate with my music.
   I play keyboard jazz at the coffee shop on Saturday afternoons, all original stuff. Some of the songs have been with me for ten years. Some are new, just emerging over the previous week. But overall, it’s very much an And, repeat sort of thing.
   There are two ways I can play my songs. I can suspend my brain for a while, just go back through them from memory because I know them really well. That sort of music goes into the background and comes across okay but not great.
   The second way is to put in the mental and emotional effort to find the beauty and the meaning in each song, yet again. That requires concentration and intention. It can leave me simultaneously feeling both refreshed and exhausted.
   Not every listener notices the difference, but some do. I see it in their far-off looks and spontaneous smiles.
   And that’s what it’s all about, this And, again thing. It’s about being able to remain present to meaning, beauty and human connection on yet another time through.

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