Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
–Carl Jung
When I served on the editorial board for WATERSTONE, Hamline University’s literary journal, my job was to wade through the short story submissions looking for gold. As is wont to happen, I found more pyrite than gold. Some truly terrible stuff, some decent stuff that wasn’t quite ready, and stuff that I loved and fought for but didn’t end up making it in the issue.
I took a lot from that experience (largely the reminder of just how much ineligible stuff there is out there and how much more special you need to be to stand out) including a better understanding of myself as a writer. In reading these stories, I began to see the quirks in my own writing. Short cuts at an emotional moment I wasn’t able to face, the instinct not to trust the reader and be repetitive to drive the point home.
Normally, this is where Mr. Double Standard would show up and say, “Oh, but see, when *I* do it, it works and it’s brilliant.” But actually, when I saw these bits of poor writing in others, it made me recognize it in my own work. In fact, I vividly remember once, while reading submissions, I stopped in the middle of the story I was reading and went to my computer to fix something similar I’d recently done in a piece for school. I didn’t do it knowing that it didn’t work. But when I saw someone else do it, I understood WHY it didn’t work.
Sometimes, the hardest part of my job is reading a submission that’s not quite ready. You’d think it would be easy: reject it and move on. But what makes it hard is that I sometimes see my own foibles and I think, “Wow, if I’m rejecting this because of that annoying habit, what would another editor think of what I’m doing in my own work?” Of course, it gives me a reprieve of sorts and allows me to go make things right (or try). And there’s this little part of me that says, “If you see what’s wrong, then work with the writer to fix it.” And sometimes, I do. (Other times, there are far too many other elements that aren’t jiving which ultimately leads to a rejection.)
I find, though, that the authors who reach me–the ones whose work makes me rush the manuscript to my ed board so I can snatch it up before anyone else–are the ones who are nothing like me. The ones whose brains seem to function on a different wavelength, like they get something about the process or humanity that’s not quite registering with me. It’s the writers who surprise me, I guess. Because we’re so different.
You know I don’t do memes and the like but if you’re a blogger, try taking the Jung quote at the top and doing your own post around it.
Filed under: Writing
