Golden

"Why are you stressing out about this? Just slap some shit down and turn it in, I'm sure you'll get an A. You're a good writer."

"It's not about the grade. I don't give a shit about grades; I never have. It's about the craft."

Here is the make or break moment, where I must prove my mettle for real. I suffer from the same delusions most young writers have. It goes something like this. After completing a piece of prose, I always believe it is one of two things:  A) Garbage, and undeserving of being looked at again (much less revised), or B) Golden: the Holy Bible, immaculate and perfectly conceived in every way, and tampering with it would amount to blasphemy. In other words, not to be fucked with.

Unfortunately for me, neither of these things are ever true. Writing is never finished; one could argue that nothing that has ever been written really is. Although we'd like to finally say "it's finished," it is not. Even some of the finest novels ever published could probably be revised a few more times and be better than they already are. Nothing is ever perfect.

Case in point: The low-level creative writing class I signed up for at the beginning of the semester. Our final project is to turn in a revised, polished draft of a piece of writing (I've chosen creative nonfiction), and now I am faced with tampering with something I strove to make perfect to begin with. After all, why would you turn in something you weren't sure was the best it could be in the first place? This is something they teach you early on in school, and it is the first and hardest habit to break. You must be willing to tear it apart and rebuild it from the ground up. Such a task is frightening, almost impossible to think about. What can I do to make this better?


Revisions don't come easy to me. I write more stream-of-consciousness like. I may start with a general outline, or a frame or structure to work with, and I may even delete entire pages as I go, re-write entire paragraphs, or restructure my narrative as I see fit, but all of these edits occur whilst the draft is being written, all before the last sentence has been typed, the final period placed. After that is done, I save it, and never look back. This is a disgusting habit, and it is not the path to success.

Thus am I faced with taking my art more seriously. Is it important to get a good grade? Of course. But I could really care less about whether I have an A or an F in the class (side-note: I have an A), as long as what I have turned in is as polished as I can make it, revised to the best of my ability, and can level little or virtually no criticism towards it. I could argue that my piece is perfect as stands, in terms of what I aimed to communicate and whoever didn't "get it" be damned, but that's the easy way out. The cop out. I could change a few sentences, alter a few key details, revise a couple sloppy descriptions, and say it is "better," but this is still cheating.

Why do I take it so seriously now? Why is it the only thing on my mind? 10 1/2 measly 1.5 spaced pages of 12-point Times New Roman text, with JAG or Law & Order-esque timestamps placed on them--why is it important? Because this is my life; this is all that matters now. This is what I want to do, and what I feel I should be doing with my life. Hell, my measly entry-level writing course is the only class I took this semester that I didn't dread going to. It's the only thing that stimulated me intellectually, continued to give me hope about my entire liberal arts education. It will do me little good down the road to enter higher-level writing courses while I'm pursuing a degree (and eventually an M.F.A.) and not have these habits instilled in me. I have to get serious now, because the classes (and, indeed, the craft itself) will not wait for me: they will get more serious on their own. My number one fear is ending up a fish-out-of-water in some advanced writer's course when I'm expected to turn in fantastic works of art just to get by.

"You're a good writer."
True, but good and great are two different things. I'm a damn good writer--and I'll be the first to say it. But I am not a master. And masters have to slog through a lot of shit to get where they're at. You have to build, destroy, re-build, demolish, build, polish, tweak, re-wire, re-structure, and fight tooth and nail to produce quality work. This task is what frightens me--even more than writing itself (which, believe me, frightens me a lot; on a daily basis). It would be nice if there was some book you could read that had all the answers in it, or if it were some test you could study and cram for and be assured you pass. But there are no guarantees in this. Like all art, it is too subjective. Pass, fail, it doesn't matter to me either way. I may be able to spin straw into gold, but now the objective is "Take that gold and mold it into a fucking statue."