Friday, December 19, 2008

writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting

Almost three years ago I began a short personal essay for a class. It turned out okay. It satisfied the requirement for the class and I earned an A, but I knew it had more work before it was something really good. So I set it aside and came back to it months later. I extensively rewrote it and submitted it to a workshop course. There it received some of the most positive feedback of anything I submitted during my time in the MFA program. I rewrote again and entered the new version in a contest at the university. It came in third. I rewrote again. I started submitting it for publication to journals. Although I've been submitting things for years, this was the first piece to receive regular personal notes instead of only form rejections. Most of the notes were simple hand-written comments along the lines of "please consider submitting again in the future" at the bottom of the form letter. However, one journal actually included a full letter with specific critiques explaining why despite the essay's strengths they didn't feel it was quite right for them. So even though I was getting consistently positive feedback, it still wasn't accepted, so I took another look at it and rewrote again.

Months went by with no change. Encouraging comments, but no acceptances. So again I decided to look it over and try to see how else I might improve it. And unlike my past evaluations of it, I didn't think the essay was that good. It had definite strengths, but it also had what now struck me as glaring weaknesses. The momentum of the piece fell flat about halfway through, so the essay itself simply didn't work. I thought about it but couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. So more than two years after I first started writing it, and more than a year after I began submitting it, I set the piece aside and decided to stop submitting it until I could solve its structural problems. I did this suspecting that the essay was simply a failure, something that comes close without ever quite working right.

Another couple of months passed, and I picked it up again, curious if I might see anything now that I missed the last time. And sure enough, some new ideas came to mind. The essay's faltering momentum seemed as evident as before, but now I could envision a new structure, a complete renovation, that might fix it. I'm not yet done with this new rewrite, but I feel excited about the essay again and think it might finally reach its potential.