Ever have
that awful feeling in your stomach when someone is looking at your writing and
you want to run away and hide? Have you ever had that feeling where you
suddenly realize that what you wrote was just a bunch of nonsense from the
moment that idea popped into your head, and you secretly wish that you could
pluck the paper from the reader's hand and skip away like a magical elf
screaming, "You'll never get me"?
Ignore
it, please. Our magical elves need to stay hidden.
Often,
when somebody's reading my writing, I try to let my mind return to the moment
when I'd been proud of that piece of writing, when I'd written down something I
knew was beautiful, and I knew was brilliant. I bask in the
warmth of the magic I'd written, the magic that is within that essay my reader
is, at that moment, reading. And I promise myself that I will not let that
magic be cut out and thrown away. I promise myself that I will make the final
draft look like the older and more beautiful version of draft one, not some
plastic Barbie doll perfection that I will never call mine.
When
someone edits your draft or requests a change in the writing, do it. Don't
feel like the editor is a monster who is taking away your baby. The magic about
editing is that you choose how you change your writing.
Your writing's about you, no one else. The editor is not the writer. The editor
is not the one who put his life into the writing. Yes, fix the
imperfections.
But fix them
your way.
