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Your Writing Never Gets Better Unless You Are Willing to Fail
You need to get humbled as a writer to get better
Growing up as a writer in the newspaper business is not for the proud, or for those who believe what they write is perfect the first time every time.
You sit at a desk, minutes before a deadline, pounding on your keyboard and waiting for the scream, “I need it now” from the editor now standing a few feet away. You hit send; then wait for the inevitable beating that follows.
Five minutes later he throws a printed-out version of your story on the desk with enough red ink to make any college writing professor drool in envy. Now you rewrite in minutes, submit again, and then give way to a copy editor who will clean up the second attempt with what you swear is a smirk.
If you survive as a newspaper person, you learn to write with intensity in minutes what most writers take a morning to create, and you can only survive if your ego will let your writing fail.
If you want to be a proficient writer, you have to get humbled early, and often, and be willing to understand your best work hasn’t been written yet, and won’t be, until you master your craft.
We get better when other writers, those with more experience and craftsmanship than us, look…
