Recently my creative writing professor scribbled out an entire scene in my paper and handed it back to me. He told me it was terrible and needed to be reworked completely.
The first time someone takes a red pen to your writing and crosses almost everything out, you'll want to cry.
You might hate that teacher, parent, or colleague. You might get defensive and insist your writing is perfect because someone has already told you so. You might start to hate writing and never pick up your pencil or keyboard again. You might ignore the criticism and move on, failing to realize what editing and reworking could mean for future readers.
In reality, you ought to embrace the process of editing as soon as you can. Editing is to writing as communication is to intimate relationships. They are worthless without their ingredients.
That same creative writing professor put into words something I've believed all along: "Editing your writing is an act of love."
When I was in high school, I took visual art classes. My teacher told my parents I "responded well to criticism" and wanted to get better. I didn't see what the big deal was. Of course I wanted to get better. I would do whatever the experts said if it meant I could improve. Then I picked up on the fact that other students ignored criticism and left their work at the same level time after time, with no revisions along the way.
To be perfectly honest, I envied them. They were being so independent. They weren't in it to please other people. They didn't care if they were "good" or not. They just wanted to express themselves.
Now I know better. Editing, improving, and responding to criticism is like bettering a marriage between you and your work. You work to make your spouse a better human. You correct your spouse's mistakes when they cause harm or distraction. You help your spouse shine. You show your spouse off to other people and let the world see how great they are, but you can't do any of this without building a foundation and communicating with them constantly.
Work with them. Cooperate. Try something new and see how it works. Will something else work better than what we're doing right now? Is it a spouse or piece of writing I'm talking about here? Well, it doesn't really matter.
When you edit a piece of writing, either your own or a friend's, you're saying, "I want this to be better. I want people to love this thing with me. I want to spend my precious time on this earth looking for ways to make this paper the best it can be."
You should be so deeply in love with your work that you won't rest until other people love it, too.
I developed a passion for editing when college began. I was a big fish in a little pond of inaugural Honors College students. We started learning how to write for college together. I looked over essays my peers wrote and tried to be gentle with my corrections, but the stakes were bigger than ever. They were going to be graded very harshly if they left mistakes. Before too long, I was crossing out words, writing small novels in the margins, and offering to edit papers left and right. I asked to edit papers no one wanted me to edit at all. I wanted to make the ideas of my peers more readable, more enjoyable, and more worthy of love from outsiders.
Now I work as a contributing writer for the online news source you're reading, and as Editor-in-Chief for this school's branch.
Art is not and never will be about expressing yourself.
There's value in that, yes. There's a therapeutic quality about producing art for art's sake or for your sake. I do it all the time. Expression of the self is an important part of art, but expression is not the point.
Good, high art—be it read, watched, or listened to—is objective in value. People know the difference between good art, bad art, and just OK art when they see it. They can see when you've worked hard at your craft, practiced, and improved to the point of completion. Good art is for the person looking at it. A good book is for the reader, not the author. Making your audience fall in love is the most important.
