End-of-Year Reflection

Perhaps the worst trait a writer can have is an ego. In the beginning, it's seems like an advantage- you're more willing to share your work, more confident in starting work on pieces, and more motivated to work. I've never had problems with deadlines- my Independent Writing Project had a first draft on April 27th, and was mostly done by the 24th. Once you've written your piece, though, it becomes a burden of ridiculous proportions.

Fig. 1: From my progress blog: The ending is finally finished

I think a lot of my classmates suffer from a lack of ego. I suffer from the opposite. An ego manifests itself in many forms, and the first you see is complacency. I can honestly say that complacency crashed my first two pieces. They were pretty solid to begin with (or maybe that's just the ego at work again) but they never got any better. I got pretty reasonable reviews from my class. After I was told that they were "OK," both my poem and my non-fiction piece never changed again. Even worse, in the case of the poem, I was forced to make changes when I was asked to present a second draft. Since I hadn't put much- or any- thought into changes, my poem got much, much worse.
Non-fiction piece: Check out the revision history. The first section hasn't changed since it was first written.
Poem: The first draft is included beneath the second. There's a full extra section tacked on at the end, and it ruins the piece.
After that, an ego manifests in an unwillingness to accept help from others. During the half-class whip-share sessions, I'll admit I still consider a lot of the advice I received from my classmates pretty poor, mainly because a lot people were forced to share when they really didn't have any good ideas. But a lot of the one-to-one reviews, especially from Aaron, George, and Kathy, were of excellent quality, and my anthology submission could have improved substantially with their help. And I really didn't act on the advice- I made half-hearted changes, but never took the risk of great change.
That all went bottom-up when I got slapped in the face with a C+ review from Dr. Clark. I had received very little in the way of truly negative reviews before then, because my story was superficially very pleasing to read while the underlying story was weak.

Fig. 2: Cruel but true

I made some drastic changes after that, first using Dr. Clark's advice, and then with Aaron's. Even though it was meant to be just line edits, Aaron and I nearly rewrote the piece together. The piece dropped from 2,500 to 2,000 words in the span of nearly two hours of work. It's still a bit embarrassing that my hand had to be forced before I made a change.
I remember Robin Hemley gave a very detailed account of this exact problem during his talk. It's like mathematics in elementary school. You go through five years of life being told that you are just the most precious little math genius the school has ever seen. Then you find out that you're honestly pretty mediocre.
The problem is worst when your language is excellent but your storylines are weak, because then whenever someone gives your piece a quick glance and then moves on they'll tell you it's wonderful when it's really quite poor.
I'd like to say the problem got better during my Independent Writing Project, but I worry that it didn't. I can't quite tell. I asked a lot of people for advice, and tried to implement a lot of it, and I did rewrite at least the final third, and mixed up some scenes, but I worry that the amount of revision still wasn't impressive.
I heard a lot of "I hear your voice so well in this!" as usual. And it's truly an awful thing to hear, because I know that it's meant as a compliment but so often it just means "this piece is superficially good."
And that's really not a great compliment to hear, if it is a compliment at all.