Thursday, November 20, 2014

Logic-ing It Out

I've always had a hard time sharing what I write. From poems to simple essays my writings were mine and mine alone. As I got older I would slowly share what I wrote with select people, mainly my essays. Sooner rather than later I got over people reading my school assignments, but I still had my poems and my own little stories I wrote to myself. These were mine. I kept them safe in a notebook locked away from the world, for my eyes only. Again as I got older I chose to share these poems with a select few, and only a select few. This still hasn't changed. I had mamma bear instincts when it came to my writings and I protect them at any cost. For some reason I gained this same sort of instincts when it comes to my personal essay. It felt strange and scary to share it with anyone who meant something to me (No offense guys). So when I asked my boyfriend to look over my paper I was more than scared, I was terrified. He looked over my draft in it's simplest form as I reminded him that it was rough and I still had a lot of work to do. When he finished reading he started picking it apart and I couldn't help but feel defensive of my work. This was my story, why should anyone else tell me how to write it. But I tried to stay calm. I asked him to try and elaborate on what he meant, maybe I was misunderstanding.He poked at the grammical errors and the sentence fragments. I saw what he was talking about but  I still didn't seem to be getting where he was coming from, that was not the idea of the poem I had in my head. So he decided to show me. He took one paragraph and made it his own. Asking me questions about my own life and what about that event made it special. 5 minutes later he had recreated what I had written and I was startled to realize he had taken the majority of the emotion out of it. He had taken my emotion and made it logical and it made me so upset. I went home that night with the full intention of ignoring all the feedback he had given me, it was just a draft after all. Once I got home I read what he wrote once again, more out of obligation than anything. As upsetting as it was that he tried to logic out my paper I began to see his point. And as much as I didn't like what he had done, there was value in it. It was worth a second look.

No comments:

Post a Comment