Writing is a reflection of life, I firmly believe that.
No matter if you’re writing fiction, fantasy, biography… the way we write is always a reflection of the way we live.
And the way we live is constantly in flux.
I can’t begin to describe how many changes I have experienced in my life over the past three and a half years. I took a “life-change stress” quiz in a psychology class last week, and I scored high enough to warrant the result of a 50% chance of getting sick due to stress-related causes.
The thing is, though–I don’t see change as a bad thing.
I think it’s actually really good,
and it can mean wonderful things for our writing.
If our lives change so much, so should our writing. Change is hard, but change in writing can often mean forward progress.
This week, I had a class workshop for my full 20-page draft of the chapbook I am working on.
I love the poems I wrote. I know, it’s kind of an understood writerly thing to critique your own writing harshly, but I think these poems are the best I have ever written.
I was nervous to take them to workshop because I didn’t want to sit there while they were critiqued and pulled apart, and exposed to the harshness of possible significant change.
But I was very pleasantly surprised. I ended up with a document full of typed notes with very possible revision suggestions, one of which meant refocusing the theme of my chapbook in a direction that the poems were leaning towards but I didn’t notice it. I felt energized.
GOOD revision, is re-seeing your work from a new perspective. What can I see about my work when I don’t look at it through a lens of it being a finished work, but instead I see it as something in flux, in process, and in need of improvement?
I would dare say you can see a new, fresher work.
My watercolor painting professor always tells us that the art of watercolor is to put down the fewest strokes possible to keep the sparkle of the pigment.
Writing, I think, is the opposite.
Writing that sparkles, that seems fresh and clean, is rarely a first draft, if ever.
Writing like that takes draft after draft, but not only that–it takes re-seeing each draft in a new way so you find the proper mindset through which to view the text, the proper lens that produces the best result.
So be encouraged, you revisers of the cyber-world.
Let’s make our writing sparkle.
Abigail Joy
Pomegranate Seeds 