One of my biggest weaknesses in my writing is just plain old everyday grammar errors. So, if I don’t have someone look over my writing, I just end up looking like a total idiot. Luckily, I married a man who is kind of geniusey when it comes to writing and I’ve always had him check my work for basic grammar errors. But, when it comes to him checking whether the subject matter in my writing was strong or weak or what not, that’s a different matter, I tend to get a bit upset when I feel like he’s criticizing my work.
In the reading the author mentions the fear that people have that if someone looks at your writing that they might think that it was so bad that you would have to totally start over again. That is actually a huge fear for me. Having to take something that you have already written and completely change it is the scariest thing in the world to me and I’m not sure why.
I guess that at some point in my life I must have gotten the crazy idea that writing was something along the lines of an abstract painting; the kind where you throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and then just see what happens and where everything falls and that once all the splattered paint is in place that you can’t change anything because… then it wouldn’t be art. At some point I got the idea that the more planning and structure that you put into your writing the less magical or spiritual that it would be but that’s obviously not true.
Since I’ve been in the media arts program though, I’ve had the opportunity to have a lot of my work be viewed by other people and it was kind of hard at first but now I’ve come to really appreciate it because most of the time it is meant well and has actually helped me to do better work.
So, after reading the reading and after having experienced how valuable my peers’ feedback has been this semester, I’m going to try and be more open to showing my work to other people because all it can do is help me do better work.
I really like how you talked about how complex art really is. I feel like we want to believe that art is somehow magical and free so that we could just throw down something powerful without much effort, but the truth is that like all things, if we want to be good at art, writing, music, film making, etc...it takes a lot of work. We have to understand what we want to create and when we do, we can imbue some of those elements that aren't created by structure, spirituality, passion, and emotion, because our structure is now good enough that we can look beyond it. Thanks for bringing this up Rhonda.
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