Re-examiner

Ever re-read something you wrote a year ago and believe that someone else wrote it?

One of the things I can say about my writing, even related to today's earlier post, is that when you read and edit something you wrote at different intervals you judge it differently. At some point there is enough separation between you and the work that you can see it as something independent of yourself. It exists outside of your own ego.

When I criticize much of my old work (poetry I wrote as a teenager, papers I wrote for philosophy courses in college, fiction I wrote three years ago, an unedited feature I did six months ago, etc.) I am not reading work I wrote. I’m reading work that a person I was wrote.

I can criticize the voice of that person I was. I can be embarrassed by ideas that person that I used to be saw as important. And I can praise the skill he might have had in crafting an article. I can be impressed by the way this guy tied his comments together at the end of his rant.

But this separation takes time. My ability to remove myself from my own perspective is limited when the piece is two hours old.

This doesn’t happen when I’m being edited by someone else. I always anticipate reading work I did that is actually printed and edited with baited breath. How much will they cut? Will the cuts and changes they make be judicious and will they represent me and the subject (bands mostly) the way I initially intended the writing to. I’ve been lucky at City Paper so far. Bret McCabe, as bitchy as he can be, and he’ll play this up more than I would, is fair and doesn’t alter the meaning of stories by fiddling with my texts. I appreciate his criticism and I admire his ability to be honest with someone when he doesn’t like what I’ve provided. But I don’t really consider much of what ends up on the page entirely MY work.

When I re-read that old blog entry from a year ago that I haven’t seen since I posted it, the work isn’t mine anymore. It’s independent of my ego and somehow it seems better for that.