The process of my growth as a writer has been a tumultuous one over this past semester. As I’m writing this at the tailend of Winter 2021, I’m able to soberly reflect on the drastic ups and downs that I (and probably we) experienced, and how each experience translated into my writing. In contrast to last semester, where I was writing and workshopping my pieces more frequently and with a more delicate comb, this semester I ripped apart my works in a frenzy all within a miniscule time frame. I started off the semester in a bad headspace, getting over a recent (and in retrospect, silly) heartbreak and starting off each week promising myself I’ll catch up on lectures and homework assignments later on. Problems compounded, and eventually I found myself behind on dozens of lectures for three classes, approaching very awkward playing issues in my musical studies, and finding myself unable to navigate my social life. Typically, writing is a pretty resourceful outlet for me in these situations, but rather than expressing myself in a personal journal or series of sprawled, chicken-scratch Google docs, I escaped into my own personal thoughts and wrote diaries in my nightly ruminations. When the first assignments came up for Writing 220, I was forced to sit down with my own thoughts and try to construct some tangible product for other people to see, and this final experiment was a neat conclusion to both how I’ve grown as a writer this semester, but also as a person.
This final piece was initially going to be based off of my 2nd experiment proposal, which I believe was loosely based on a “journalistic” style of nonfiction writing (something akin to The Atlantic or Vanity Fair). As I began writing, however, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being disingenuous about what I was covering. I remember scant details about the topic, though I think I wanted to write about attachment theory and why it’s important to consider it in our own relationships. At the time of approaching the first draft of the final experiment piece, I decided that I couldn’t proceed with the topic I had chosen, and I instead focused on something that mattered much more deeply to me: IQ and intelligence in society. It’s a topic that has affected me since I was an infant, and my memories/emotions associated with the topic were revitalized when I engaged a good friend of mine about the concept a few days prior to beginning the draft. So, this leads me to the first major point about the revision process: don’t be afraid to write about something that matters to you. Your writing is just an extension of you; you must put your best foot forward if you want to connect with the audience. Be unabashedly yourself, and make no apologies for it.
As I began the draft, I quickly came to the realization that I’m going to need a number of sources if I want to talk intelligently (pun absolutely intended) about IQ. This quickly leads me to my next point about revision: try to know what you’re talking about. This is ostensibly straightforward for research/opinion writing like the piece that I created, but what if you’re writing something in a totally different medium? Perhaps you’re making a science fiction short film, or you’re drawing self-portraits. Whatever the case is, this principle still aptly applies to any piece of creative output. Despite there not being a lot of declarative, objective information to showcase in your piece like a more research oriented medium, the point here is to showcase your inspiration, and in order to be inspired you have to expose yourself to a lot of different things. If the point of your piece isn’t necessarily to inform the audience, but to make them feel more human, you need to know what it feels like to be human. Even if your piece isn’t strictly objective or seeking to inform the audience, you still need to know what they may be feeling when they’re exposed to it.
I experienced this problem throughout my own piece, as the objective based sections interweave with personal stories about the topic, the parts that let the reader know why I needed to tell this story. I had to somehow substantiate everything I was claiming about IQ with an intricate understanding of what it is and where the scientific (and outside) community, and then immediately throw all of it out the window to focus solely on my own feelings about it. This part was actually much harder to achieve, personally, and it took many failed attempts when I was drafting. In this personal stage of the piece, I needed to just throw out a bunch of different stories on paper and then see how miserably they flopped when re-reading it in the context of the larger concept. Eventually, some little tidbit of an anecdote seems to stick appropriately (or at least not as poorly as the other globs of memories), and then you suddenly have something to work with. This leads me to my final, and perhaps most important point about the revision process: you must give yourself permission to fucking suck. It won’t be good the first time around. Or the second. Maybe the third (but probably not). That’s ok. It doesn’t really matter how many trials it takes. As long as you start with something, rip it to shreds, and find something substantive from it. That’s how pieces get made, and it’s ultimately a much more fulfilling process than the alternative.