Readers don't have to love you. Do you love you?

Every now and then, I sense I'm talking too much. I have a habit of thinking aloud, due in part, I suspect, to my falling in love with the dialogic approach to learning employed by my favorite teachers in high school. I figure out what I think as I speak.

When I'm alone, or when I just don't feel like speaking, I figure out what I think as I write.

I think that overwriting feels natural because, in my early years, at a time when many teachers were eager to incite in their students both the ability to write and the awareness to quiet down, I had shown proficiency in the latter and hope in the former.

The first research essay I ever did was on Helen Keller, and my third-grade teacher, impressed that I handwritten six pages for my rough draft, had the heart to exempt me from completing a final draft.

In eighth grade, when we all had to complete a research project that was, at the time, an infamous five pages, I handed in a final piece that was closer to ten.

"Catherine wrote a book," my English teacher said, as she fastened my multiple drafts and final copy — title page and all — with a giant paperclip.

In my junior year of high school, Ms. Coppens, who had wild curly hair and a frank expression that juxtaposed her tenderness, said that she had wanted badly to read my poem, inspired by Caliban of The Tempest, to the class, as a model of good writing, and was sorry that she couldn't.

"It was just so long," she explained, not at all unkindly.

I am privileged to have had mentors who nurtured my fixation. I am equally privileged to now have mentors and beta readers who entertain hours of Zoom calls and overextended cocktails-and-nachos dates to hear me talk about my writing.

But these mentors have their limits. Once, I overwrote a chapter of my graduate thesis and sent it to my adviser, the writer David Freed, who said, with candor and respect for the both of us, that I was far too talented to neglect the most painful, albeit necessary step of revising and also that he didn't have time to do it for me.

I once dated a guy who hovered as I wrote for a flash fiction competition. "Right there," he said. "That's where you're getting irrelevant. It's not about this." He highlighted some phrases that I loved. "It's about that."

Later on, he'd say that I had bad judgment, and in many ways, he was right. It was only with his advice that I was able to write the piece that won.

One of my favorite nonfiction teachers at Harvard stressed the importance of identifying the heart of the story: the center of its purpose around which all of the blood must circulate with efficient beauty.

Now I stand by, frustrated and awed that so many writers — many of them, my fellow Vocal writers — can publish with such fervor pieces that smack with clarity and precision. How does the poet tether to the page an extended metaphor that compares opening the door to a house to the devastating ending of a romantic relationship?

These are the writers who always get read.

I don't know how they're doing it because I only know how I do it. I've become obsessed with being efficient at my day job, which entails teaching 45-minute, Common Core standards-aligned lessons to ninth graders. But my writing, which swallows me whole, remains arduous.

The other week, I wrote thirteen pages about how my upbringing contributed to my becoming a teacher, in response to an assignment for a continuing education course I am taking. While in the drafting stages, I wrote to the professor, acknowledging that the directions specified three-to-four pages, but that I was rather enjoying writing the piece. I was over the page count (I didn't tell her by how much), but I was coming to realize how many factors related to my ethnic background acted as the impetuses for my educational philosophy.

She replied in one sentence that I should revise down to five pages.

I am not confident that my writing means much of anything to anyone (all writers must acknowledge that no one owes you their readership). But I am confident that my process is amateurish. I knew what trimming down the piece would entail: rereading the entire thing, beginning to end, and confronting the shame that comes with knowing that I had written too much about too many things that no self-respecting reader would ever care to read until the end.

And, of course, upon reopening the document, I saw that the piece was excessive. I hated it. So, I set to work extracting the gunk that clogged its pores and narrowed it down to a five-page piece about teaching for courage, about which I'm still insecure, but of which I am certainly not disdainful.

I have no sense of pacing in other areas of my life, either. At the start of a run, I'll intend to take it easy, only to find that at mile three, I see no reason to settle for less than four, and by mile four, I see no reason to settle for five. The other day I dedicated almost entirely to Anna Karenina, stopping only with regret that from my temples there emerged a primal ache that signals low blood sugar. I'm not always called to cleaning, but once I begin, I'll unpack the entire house and, with a toothbrush, massacre the caulk that lines my bathtub.

I know that these fixations are part of what make me a writer. I know that overwriting is what allows me to reason with myself as I connect ideas, meander to find the cause of some recently realized effect, discover areas of my consciousness that weren't there before.

I also know and am grateful for the limits of my potential readers, who have no patience for my antics and implore me to remove what they don't want or need.

I recently reopened an essay called "True Love, Now," which I wrote and published here on Vocal last fall. On impulse, I submitted it to the Love Unraveled Challenge, but upon copying and pasting it into a document where I could perform a word count, realized that at over 3,600 words, it was already ineligible. Plus, I can't ignore the fact that this story, which to me, once felt like one of my most didactic lessons on love, now reads as self-indulgent.

Even so, I want to love it again. I want it to teach others about love. And loving it does not have to mean nipping and tucking its excesses with disdain. Loving it can mean removing the over-writing that distracts readers from its heart, which begs to be seen.

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