The five stages of “Editor’s Madness”
The process of editing is a long, grueling task of looking at the same thing over and over until you descend into the depths of “I can no longer tell if this makes sense” madness. Whether it’s writing for a newspaper or putting together a short film, the process is still similar. The creation of a story or the first draft of a scene is merely the beginning, and by the time the product is actually finished, I often never want to see it again.
Honestly, it isn’t bad in the beginning, when you still have the starryeyed optimism that whatever you are working on isn’t a terrible piece of garbage that you’ve been cursed to watch or read over and over until the eventual heat death of the universe. There are stages, and the first is definitely one of the best. Let’s call it the “Everything is Awesome” stage. As you go through your first draft, you realize mistakes or come up with new ideas, and these come fast and furious. It feels like you are making progress, and you can start to see the work take shape.
But then comes the second stage. The ideas begin to slow and you start to focus on smaller things just so that you feel like you are accomplishing something. This is the “Slowdown” phase, in which you start to realize that maybe everything isn’t as awesome as you once believed. Fatigue starts to set in and, while you feel like you’ve gotten somewhere, doubt as to whether or not that “somewhere” is actually any good begins to sink in.
The next two stages sometimes flip-flop or go hand in hand. They are the “Spinning the Wheels” phase and the “Mid-Life Crisis.” Now you will spend hours upon hours in “Spinning the Wheels”,,working on the most miniscule of details as all of your big ideas have dried up. Most of what you are doing at this stage is pointless, either because it’s some sort of procrastination or because it is completely undone by the “Mid-Life Crisis.” The “Mid-Life Crisis” sees you hit by a sudden desire to blow-up everything you’ve done up to this point. This is either driven by a sudden inspiration, which, after dealing with “Slowdown” or “Spinning the Wheels” phase, makes even the dumbest of ideas seem brilliant, or by the desire to do anything but stay in the “Spinning the Wheels” phase, even if it means destroying everything you’ve come to know and love about the piece. The end of a “Mid-Life Crisis” phase often reverts you back to the “Everything is Awesome” state of being, but more often than not, it is a false path. These are bad, as your mental and physical health begins to deteriorate due to the drudgery of the “Spinning the Wheels” and the whiplash of the “Mid-Life Crisis,” but the worst is yet to come.
After cycling through these stages a number of times, the madness starts to take hold. One “Spinning the Wheels” leads into a “Mid-Life Crisis” that will break into full out “Editor’s Madness.” This is the most dangerous phase, where the symptoms reach their peak. At least in the prior phases, you may be accomplishing something of use. But once you enter “Editor’s Madness” all progress is completely on hold. Complete and utter hate for everything you’ve done so far threatens to send the entire project into the trash can and the worst ideas yet start to slip in. Once, while in this stage, me and another editor I was working with spent three hours describing what we dubbed the “Steve Cut,” where we decided the short film we were working on would be better if it was instead about a man losing his mind over the loss of the Crocodile Hunter. Some editors never make it out of this stage, as they’ve so succumbed to their delusions or their hatred of what they once loved that they swear to never look at the thing again.
The best way I’ve found to get out of the final stage of “Editor’s Madness” is to just walk away. Most of your problems come from spending too much time with material, so putting some distance between yourself and the project will give you the best chance of coming at it from a new angle. If you do this and still find you have the desire to come back to the project, the work will be all the better for it.
It’s a tough cycle that all editors must deal with, but, eventually, you might end up with something that someone might actually enjoy. That someone probably won’t be you, of course, but maybe someone, somewhere, at some point in time might. And I guess that makes it worth it.
A C ertain Point of V iew
