Sometime in between the three literature classes I’m taking this semester, I find time to ponder the meaning of the word “writer.” Hypothetically I could use this time to study for these classes or maybe I could actually, you know – write – but could I really be an English major if I didn’t agonize over the meaning behind every word? Could the blue curtains in a short story really be just a pair of blue curtains, instead of a symbol for the main character’s depressive tendencies?

Of course not, that’d be too easy.

First rule of writing is to make everything as difficult as possible.

But if you’ve decided to write for a living you already know that. Everyone around you is going into practical fields like nursing and engineering. But you have chosen to sit at a desk and figuratively slam your head against a blank sheet of paper. Now that you’ve gone down this road of uncertainty, the only thing left is to make everyone reading your work as uncertain as you are about it. Is it good, is it worth something? Who knows? That’s the beauty of it.

It’s only beautiful if you write it down.

This is awfully inconvenient if you’re a writer with perpetual writer’s block. On one hand, you’ve got to ask yourself whether you’re really a writer if you can never get anything down due to writer’s block. But on the other hand, you’ve got to ask yourself whether you’re really a writer if you don’t get writer’s block. If writing always comes easy to you, you’re doing it wrong.

If you love every piece you write, you’re doing it wrong.

If you can look back at a short story you wrote two years ago without cringing and wanting your hands removed, you may want to question whether you’re advancing as a writer. This doesn’t extend to a few golden pieces that you’ll be proud of for the rest of your life in all likelihood. But all your old essays and memoirs should immediately evoke a sudden, strong desire for revision.

Tell me I’m not weird for loving revisions.

Writing is an insane feeling, but editing and revising feels like the equivalent of what I envision the Polar Plunge to be like, minus the unpleasant feeling of freezing cold water. The best thing about editing is that you can perfect a piece to the best of your ability and then come to hate it a month later, leaving you with no other choice but to take it apart until you remember what made it tick to begin with. As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” This makes editing a lifelong process. I can’t commit to a person but I can commit to a ten-page paper!