Criticism

Whenever I mention my writing, my older sister gets an attitude (yes you do).  She’d quip, “You never let any of us read it,” as if it was a mythical creature that couldn’t possibly exist without her seeing it with her own eyes.  Well, she’s not wrong.  Not that my writing is akin to Sasquatch, but that it wasn’t until my fourth year in college that I let anyone read my stuff (with the exception of a really bad, really dark poem in high school that made the rounds among my friends that I now wish I could reach back 15 years and snatch out of their hands). 

As a creative writing major, I was required to share my work, or I was in the wrong program.  I would have gotten an incomplete, never graduated, and still have had to pay back student loans that I am less than six months away from paying off (graduate loans do not apply).  To read aloud and participate in a critical discussion of a string of words sprung from my imagination (I can bring up the whole writing is like giving birth metaphor, but that’s been done, and what the hell do I know about giving birth, anyway?) was/is actually quite terrifying.  I fully expected my professor to ball up my story or play or poem and toss it into the trash can behind her.  That never happened, of course.  There was criticism, because if you praised every piece on the table, you weren’t properly analyzing the work.  And no matter how “constructive” the criticism, you lost a little bit of your soul every time someone suggested a change. 

Putting your work out there cannot be that dramatic.  Nothing would ever get published, because there would be nothing to publish.  Every piece of prose or poetry would be locked in a writer’s hard drive, where it would stay until he or she deleted it, frightened of dying and the next of kin discovering it.  And I’ll admit it: I’m a little bit that person. 

I’ve heard it before, but in light of my recent decision to revisit my writing, it seemed so timely and sage, but Tina Fey in her book BossyPants (our book club selection for May!), discusses the need to let your writing out, to not over-think it, to let it go. 

You have to let people see what you wrote.  It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated.

What’s interesting is that I can take that advice for every job application I send out, but I cannot for my writing.  I’ve been inundated with rejections on the job front.  I shake it off and keep on applying.  Why does it have to be different for story and novel submissions?

I’ve submitted work before.  I submitted a (in retrospect, very bad) novel proposal to a popular publisher, and a poem to the same journal to which I plan to submit a short story later this month.  And I’m still here to talk about it.  I’ve even been on the other side, as the editor for my undergraduate university’s arts journal.  I had plenty of help weeding out the selections that would go into the issue, but I was the one who signed the rejection letter to those who didn’t make the cut.  It really isn’t personal.

Does this mean I’m going to suddenly share my old work for all to see?  Oh, probably not.    

Now I need to go and start revising.  Where is that red pen?