Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. I've posted a blog on the importance of handwriting already, but to sum it up quickly, handwriting slows down that which the brain and eye quickly flash through. This is why when children are learning their letters, it helps to say the letter aloud while also slowly tracing the shape of the letter together. Handwriting brings the detail of the shape into closer and slower motion for the brain to really learn it.
This early childhood lesson is an excellent lens to begin this new blog on how writing, again, allowed me to look more closely, but this time at some of life's hard truths.
Here's a list of painful lessons about life that writing helped me to understand better:
1. Rewriting and Revising are not "as needed;" they are required and necessary to the writing process. What does this have to do with life? YOU WILL MESS UP. I live my life terrified to mess up, to miss the mark, to fall short. I over analyze everything and worry myself into a panic attack. But in the last two years, I've really prioritized my writing. I'll speak about one particular writing project: an academic essay that I'm trying to get published. It was a chapter in my dissertation that I developed over a two year period during graduate school. I tried to get it published but, like the inexperienced writer I am, the first several attempts, I just submitted it "as it was" to the top tier journals in my academic field. I received swift rejections but always with a small note that it had some neat potential that they hoped I would work on. I finally read Wendy Belcher's incredible guide to publishing. (Highly recommend: here's the link.) I realized I had not changed a single word from the dissertation to craft the chapter into an article! Not only that, I had just gone down a checklist of "prestigious" journals without any care toward niche or nuance! This was after three rejections which were not at all discouraging but also provided no real revision work. Two desk rejections and one invitation to resubmit with a portion of the essay rewritten. I set out to work. I rewrote the chapter into an article. I submitted it. I received a thorough and painful rejection. It took my ego weeks to recover. I printed their feedback, learned how to take feedback, revised it and submitted again. Another thorough and heartfelt rejection -- again with promising and helpful notes and huge shoutout from a reviewer and the editor to be diligent and sure to revise. The argument was intriguing and needed more work before it hopefully found a home. By now, I was looking at these pages long notes for revisions and reasons why the text was rejected as encouragement. I dismantled the entire thing and rewrote it. Rejected again. I just finished another revision -- this time the framework was fine, but I needed to add some expertise and some terminology as well as a bit more close reading to sections where I cut my ideas short. The article is currently resubmitted, and I am hopeful. I am also grateful. If that article had printed how I'd written it as my dissertation, it would have held 10% of the work I had actually done. I didn't know how to write three years ago. The "mess ups" of five rejections were necessary for me to not only learn these writing skills but also necessary for me to emotionally learn a relationship which gives tough but necessary feedback. It's also brought up the question: how much do you really care about this project? If I care enough to mess up on it, possibly be humiliated and hurt, pick myself up, and do it all again, I must be really passionate about that project. Quick quitters don't have deep investment. I also didn't know how to receive feedback. That's the next point.
2. Feedback = Teamwork = Better Product
Writing is hard. It's so personal. The emotional investment of it makes any critique or notes for improvement feel like a personal rejection, and sometimes people do leave a**hole feedback just to be mean, with no intention of helping the writer grow. In my experience though, that happens less than 5% of the time. Usually, in my experience, the issue is that I don't know how to receive feedback, and perhaps more specifically, the feedback they are giving me is feedback that I am refusing to process because I don't want to do the work. I learned a hard truth that most of the time what people get defensive about is usually an area where they really struggle. My inability to process feedback is because I feel deeply insecure about my writing. I actually think I'm a bad writer. Why do I think that? Because I had improperly processed feedback I'd received as telling me I was a bad writer...by one person...one time. Great feedback, really great feedback aims to improve the product. This last round of revision on the project I mentioned in the earlier section was tough. I received a numbered list of everything I did wrong. At first, it put a lump in my throat. The second reading, it made me irritated. How could the reviewer be so nit picky? They were just looking for things to gripe about. By the tenth time I'd read through the feedback and highlighted and annotated everything single comment, I loved that little list. It was the most thorough and helpful set of corrections I've ever received. It made editing my essay so much easier too! And I realized there were at least three things that I had been doing wrong for years! And I have a Ph.D.!
There's one final thing that I want to give its own paragraph to, but it's connected to point 2. After I had pored and pored over the reviewers comments, I had my comments written in probably three different inks from randomly picking it up and rereading and writing out my responses, I went back AND I HIGHLIGHTED THE PRAISE. It's so easy to get hung up on what's wrong, what's not finished, all the not-good-enoughs. I wanted to make sure that, now that I'd given those reviewers a very fair and solid chunk of my attention that I marked the most important thing: they believed I had something worth still working on. I kept looking at their comments. I continued to reference the reviewers notes over and over again for the six months it took me to complete these revisions, but now, in bright pink, to bring it to the very tip top of my attention, was their encouragement, the reason they had written so very much feedback was because the product was actually worthwhile. They believed they had an argument in their hands that was worthy of that much of their time. That's a compliment.
Writing is hard. Publishing is even harder. Rejection in any part of life is just the pits. But doesn't it feel so awesome when, after all that hard work (that absolutely nobody but you will ever fully know or understand), someone, somewhere in the big or little world, looks at what you've done and just fully appreciates it. It's such a wonderful gift. I think the whole reason we're here is to learn how to do life with other people, appreciate and love them just for being them.
So, thanks to these lessons that writing taught me. I'm loving myself for the incredible effort I've put forward. I'm grateful for two total strangers whom I will never meet nor know because they helped me make a project that I'm passionate about better, and they even helped me realize how passionate I am about my project, and life's passions -- well, they make all the living sweeter.
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