Thoughts on Writing

I've been in a morass of internship applications, each day writing a handful of 500 word essays extoling the virtues of specific sites and why I would match with them and why they should love me. The essays require research, care, concentration, and attention. As mentioned here before, the competition for matching at a site is pretty ridiculously huge, and this is an enormous task. So, the essays matter.

Some things that I have learned, both recently and in the past, about writing:

- WORDS ARE NOT PRECIOUS. Editing helps. Editing improves writing. If you think your 560 word essay is gold, and that it cannot be improved...but if you are not given a choice in the matter...once you get it down to 500 words, the essay is better, 100% of the time. 100%. (I'm not speaking about works of fiction. I'm talking about essays with pre-given word counts.) So, no matter how painful cutting those last 20 words are, the final version will still be better than the previous version.

- WORDS ARE PRECIOUS. When writing multiple essays, and frequently utilizing the "Save As" function as a method of starting from a template and then creating new documents, one must remember to actually freaking do it before making changes to the original template and saving the document via the Ctrl-S reflex. If you haven't told your computer to back up the files, once you delete a paragraph and hit Ctrl-S, well, you're flat out fucked. Like me.

- IT'S ALL OKAY, YOU CAN RECOVER. This is a hard one to remember while slamming papers on your desk because you fucked up a brilliant paragraph that you are sure could not be replicated by even the greatest literary giants in history. There is truth that when you are in the groove of a good essay that the groove itself is special, and the words that flowed so freely are to be treasured, and you know, SAVED. But. If you wrote the words the first time, you can write them again. They may not be the same words in the same order with the same rhythm and such. But they are your words, they are in you, and remember, rule #1 says that words are not precious. It is the author that is precious, and words can be replicated, even if they look different. The fact that something may not feel as perfect as the first spark of creative flow...TO ME...does not mean that the end result, being read by a snooty academic in a high tower lighting flames to the 200 essays he will read will know any different. That snooty fuck wouldn't be able to tell a re-written version of a mistakenly deleted masterpiece any more than any one else will. The only one who knows will be me, and the four of you that will read this.

And the fact that I will wake up in 20 years and still pine for the missing brilliant paragraph on my need and desire to get research experience from a snooty fuck even though really the paragraph was a lie has no bearing on my actual ability to rewrite a good paragraph.

I will now go ride my bike.