Any Review is a Good Review?

Any Review is a Good Review?

I tried my hardest, poured my blood and sweat into this piece. I spent countless hours over the right word, and the best phrase. I lost sleep pounding my ideas onto the paper. I lost more sleep, when I was worrying over the next piece, and working through details in my head that were sometimes elusive. I fought myself to keep writing and not just keep re-editing the same piece over and over again. Then there were those other times, when it came to me like breathing, and just seemed to flow out of me whole and fully formed.

When it’s done, I take this piece, this poem, short story, novel, or essay, and I put it out there for the world to see. They look at the toil of my labors and they know they see words, but they don’t know that they are looking at a piece of me, a piece of my heart, my soul, and probably a DNA strand or two. You try to move on and start on your next piece, but all the while you know that little bit of you is hanging out before the world.

Then suddenly it happens, you get a review, and it’s just more of their words talking about your words. They talk about how they liked this and they didn’t like that, and oh you missed a comma or forgot to Capitalize Utah. Yet for a moment you feel slightly stunned, not by whether they did like it or didn’t like it, or how stupid you have to be to forget to capitalize Utah, but the fact that you connected. Because if you think about it, just for a moment, you know that to take the time to read your piece, and then write a review about your piece, which requires at least a little bit of their blood, sweat, and DNA, you connected. If you hadn’t then they wouldn’t have wasted any of their blood, sweat, or DNA on you at all.