Cringe...

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.---Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Remember in school when you suffered through a test, fought with everything in your brain, and still couldn’t come up with some of the answers?

And then the bell rang. Time was up. You cringed.

You cursed yourself because THEN—once the bell rang—the answers came to you. You wanted to beg the teacher to let you take the test again, you knew you could get the answers correct this time. But it was too late. Your chances for a score of 100 vanished with the bell, gone down the tubes.

Recently I experienced that same feeling after I clicked ‘send’ and shot my WIP off into cyberspace and into the email box of a publisher. I submitted my story. My first submission ever.

At first, the moment my ‘masterpiece’ rocketed from my computer to the publisher’s computer, I felt pure, adrenaline-driven exhilaration. I’ll never again experience such a rush. And I’ll certainly never forget it. It was my lunch hour. A supportive co-worker stood over my shoulder, chanting, Hit send, hit send, hit send. And, when I DID hit send, we cheered.

Later, I opened my manuscript and looked over it. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t suddenly see the work through an editor’s eyes, sans my rose-colored glasses. Now it didn’t seem so perfect. Doubts flooded my mind—should the character have done that? Should I have explained this more? Will the reader know what I meant by this? Was that duplicate word in there before? His name is spelled wrong! The damn name is spelled wrong! But this document was perfect when I subbed it!

I cringed.

All of the sudden I saw holes, huge gaping holes in the story. Oh, no. This character’s feelings are not validated! I should have expanded more on this line or that line. Why didn’t I explain certain things better? Why? Why? Why not? All those things I should have changed, would have changed if…well, you know. The old shoulda-woulda-coulda.

More cringing.

Could I unsub? Could I take the manuscript back and re-do it? Add a thing or two here, a tidbit there? No. Too late.
After a spell of heartsick doubt, the next—and quite unexpected—wave of emotion swept over me.

Elation. Yes, elation.

Why? Because I SAW the flaws. I saw them and I DID cringe.

The fact that I spotted these gaps on my own was proof that somehow, someway, those lovely seeds had sprouted in my mind and I’d begun to understand some of the dynamics of writing.

Don’t you see the beauty in that? Think about it. That ability to see my work through another’s eyes was another beautiful step in learning. A revelation, a new grain of knowledge that could be used in my next work, and my next, and my next. I'd love to have had this 'through-the-editor-looking-glass' vision sooner, before I submitted. But I didn't. Maybe for beginning writers, that's just meant to be. Part of the growing process.

Wonderful fellow writers have generously helped me with so many issues in my work and have provided priceless knowledge in my writing journey; and I’ve absorbed every morsel that came my way, corrected many mistakes with their guidance. Repeated mistakes, yes. And, when these are pointed out to me, I cringe—over and over, seeming to make the same errors regularly. But when a writer actually SEES their own mistakes and they finally begin to ‘get’ it—sure, sometimes AFTER the work has been submitted—it’s a glorious thing.

We all make mistakes in our writing. And don't think I don't know that we're ALWAYS going to make them. But when WE can see the mistakes, when we can learn from them, then maybe we can then manage to do most of our cringing BEFORE we hit ‘send.’