My Worst Writing Mistake: Getting Sick of my Work
My Worst Writing Mistake: Getting Sick of My Work
By Michelle Wittle
It's true. Sometimes I look at a piece of my work for so long; I get so sick of looking at it. I just send it along without giving it a final look over. Because of that fatal mistake, I know my manuscripts get thrown out before the editor is even done reading the piece.
How do I know I made such errors?
Let me give you just one example of my, let’s call it stupidity.
I had this one short story I had been working on for months. I was having trouble deciding what tense (past or present) I should have written it in. So, I would flip flop between the two tenses to see which version I liked the best. I finally decided I liked the way it flowed in present tense.
Having decided on the tense, I thought it was now time to start sending it out to the masses. I printed multiple copies and started emailing and snail mailing the story off.
One of the printed copies lay off to the side of the computer I was working on. I looked down at the piece and I screamed. It sounded like I just saw one of those thousand legger bugs walking across the floor. But no, I wasn’t so lucky.
When I looked down at the piece, I realized my first line read, “It was is a nice walk down the shaded tree street.”
As a reader for a magazine, I knew if I came across a manuscript with such a horrific grammatical error like that, the first line would be all I read and the piece would have gone to the shredder.
Because I was so sick of my story and because I worked on it for so long, I made the grave assumption the story was perfectly proofread. This was such an embarrassing lesson to learn that now I don’t send any short stories out without having someone else and then I look at it one last time. By being so sick of my work, I ensured others would look at my writing as amateur. This was a horrific mistake that cost my story its life.
Michelle Wittle currently works exclusively with the local non-profit literary magazine called Philadelphia Stories. She blogs about writing on their blog at http://www.philadelphiastories.wordpress.com. Follow Michelle on twitter at @MichelleWittle and read her personal blog at http://www.mwittle.wordpress.com.
