Although this may be argued with (by Neha, who more likely understands both the term but may be tempered by her understanding of the writing life as well!), I believe I have reached a state of mind very like the dictionary term at least of Nirvana.
“Buddhism: the state of perfect blessedness achieved by the extinction of individual existence and by the absorption of the soul into the supreme spirit.” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed.)
In changing tense and person and all the other little technical stuff that makes up revision, I find myself as well reading beyond to find better ways, words that offer vision rather than instruction. This rewriting process is not as hateful as I suspected it would be! It’s fun in a rather twisted sense, to have the power and control over words and lives of characters I do not as yet know as well as I am learning to know them. I’m digging deep inside their psyches and finding shocking things, but lovely things as well. And I’m learning to write them down just as I’ve learned them–by watching what the characters are doing.
Not quite Nirvana as many are privileged to know it, but this third meaning offered in Webster’s also, may grant me coverage for this fleeting, temporary state: “any place or condition of great peace or bliss.”
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology