Human beings are social creatures. That is why solitary confinement is as effective a punishment as it is. When humans are isolated from others it affects them negatively in just about every way. Similarly, isolating oneself in terms of writing and conveying information to others has a similarly detrimental effect. This truth is expanded upon in “What’s That Supposed To Mean?” by Jillian Grauman, which deals with how writers ought to utilize feedback in their writing.
I have written recreationally for the past decade. In my time of learning the craft and studying the skills required to maintain it, I have come to the conclusion that writing is not the hardest part of writing. The hardest part is rewriting. It is very difficult to rethink things once they have already been put to paper in one way. This is why readers and their feedback is necessary, but it can be a real challenge to find good readers. It would probably take at least three polydactyls counting on both hands to count the number of people who have rejected reading something I have written in the past year. I understand why too. Not everyone enjoys reading so therefore they would not be the intended audience either way. The only person I can get to be a consistent audience is my mom, and while I appreciate that a lot she is not the ideal audience (she thinks anything I make is automatically perfect). Thankfully, I have found some people recently to read my writing and give me feedback on it. If I had not found anyone then I could have very easily fallen into bad habits of writing that could alienate the reader and all in all hurt my style as a writer.
Leave a Reply