A few exciting announcements:

Okay, here we go.

I am deep in the editing process for my next book, which naturally spikes all sorts of resistance. I’ve gotten much better about moving through this—I used to argue with the feedback in my head for days, sometimes I would even cry in despair (I spent a whole day in bed when I was in the editing process for On Our Best Behavior). Now, I accept feedback as loving truth, even if I feel very tired, and cooked, and ready to put a book down and move on.

I have enough experience, though, both as a reader and a writer, to know that if you can hold in this space for long enough, to really hold until you feel like you’re going to crack, something happens. Suddenly, the way appears and you know what you need to do: You can see a truer version of what you’re trying to accomplish on the other side of refining and polishing, and while its hard to slough bits away, you begin to understand how they’re weighing the whole project done.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy, or instant. Internal resistance can be excruciating. But it’s also the only force that can push your work forward. Every time I’ve written one of my own books, I’ve had to bring it to the point where the carapace breaks apart—this is painful and hard. Because by all accounts, I could be done. It could be good enough. But then, it could always be better. I’m not talking about perfection, either, I’m talking about trying to reach the truest form of what you’re trying to express.

You’ve likely heard the story of the Golden Buddha of Wat Traimit in Thailand. As the legend goes, it was a stucco statue of the Buddha that was large and weighed 12,000 pounds. When the monks went to move it into a new temple in 1955, the ropes slipped, the statue fell, and the plaster fractured, revealing a golden statue underneath. It had been covered over by monks in the centuries before to protect it from looters—nobody has sent word forward in time that the plaster covered priceless gold. (It’s valued at $250M and dated to the 12th century.)

It’s a great metaphor for the process of creating anything—it’s possible to get to a crude approximation of what you’re trying to make, but taking it to the place that you might only be able to reach in your mind requires…devastation.

I read a lot of non-fiction, and many writers remain content with the plaster stage: It holds the form, it functions, readers mostly get what you’re gesturing at. Getting to this place is not necessarily easy—writing books is hard—but it’s achievable. Moving past this point requires a lot of temerity and a willingness to suffer. This is the part of the process that cracks me.

Other writers struggle in different ways and at different points. I hear from some that they have horrendous writer’s block, and self-editing inhibits every keystroke. Some resist hammering out structure and decide that they’ll find the book as they write—a process that gives me a heart attack. (It might feel productive in the moment to “get going,” but I think it’s only a shortcut to writing a book two or sometimes even three times.) I try to work out as much as I can before I begin typing—a pre-processing exercise that can take years. It might not seem efficient, but I have to set a container before I begin to pour myself into it otherwise it’s a mess. To give you even more metaphors, for me it feels like birth: I fully bake it and then it comes out of me in a big whoosh. Drafting is fast. It’s revising and growing the manuscript up that is slow and excruciating.

One of the most frustrating parts of this phase is that you can’t rush it—speed is not your friend. For one, you need enough time to pass as you work that you can come back to your pages with fresh(er) eyes. If you’re possessed by the same energy that had you when you were writing, you won’t be able to see your argument’s flaws or where the reader might not be able to follow you because you can so easily follow yourself. You also need some separation from what you’ve created to be able to clip, clip, cut.

If writing is laborious, this part feels excruciating, in part because stories you love, and arguments well told, will still need to go—even well-shaped stucco hits the chopping block. To make this psychologically easier, I use the same approach for cutting that I adopted 20 years ago, when I was a fashion-adjacent editor at Condé Nast (wild, I know). I used to shop my way through lower Manhattan every weekend—unfortunately, not usually for the expensive and long-lasting stuff, but more for the fast fashion of the day. We needed to be dressed at work, and in my mind, that meant I needed lots of clothing, which was a bit problematic not only for the environment, but also because my apartment was 400-square-feet. (My husband called it a ship’s cabin—it had that feel. When we first met, I used to drag an ethernet cable across its entirety because I couldn’t figure out how to set up a wireless router. He first won my heart by being tech support. I was dazzled.)

Every six months, when it became impossible to close my closet doors, I forced myself to do an edit—it was too hard to march it all directly to Housing Works (a fantastic New York City non-profit), and so I would pack what I could barely bear to part with in my Patagonia duffle from college and shove it under my bed (I still own this bag, snaps to Patagonia for living their values). Over the next few months, I’d clock whether I ever searched for something I’d exiled to the bag—and after six months had passed, I’d go through it again. I would rescue a few items I’d missed, but for most of it, I couldn’t get it out of my apartment fast enough. The spell had been broken; I was ready to let go.

Editing and cutting is similar: I need to keep my anxiety at bay while I take some scissors to what I’ve made by giving everything I excise refuge first. I create a document-duffle bag and drop everything substantive I clip in there and file it away. When I’ve finished a draft, after enough time has passed, I revisit this document to see if something essential and important needs to be restored. Likely not. I keep the document in my files, and myself that the best parts can be rehabilitated into newsletters down the road. (That rarely happens either.)

I’m pretty convinced that this process works for any part of your life where you know you need to let some pieces of stucco fall away, but you’re a little scared to let go. You can put friendships you might have grown out of in the bag and stash them for a little while to see if they’re missed. You can store a project that no longer feels like a vocation in there to stew for awhile. You can stash house plans, the beginnings of a vacation itinerary, or even your half-finished novel in the bag. It works for physical things, too—like maybe that china you inherited from your grandmother needs to go in the bag for a bit, so you can release it to the world with less guilt. When you dig back through the bag, you might find that all attachments are just…gone.

With less clutter, you’re not only able to see better, but you can treasure what’s left behind. You might even find a golden Buddha.