Recently my daughter threw her whole eleven-year-old heart into a creative writing assignment.  She wrote for hours, creating three interesting main characters, an overabundance of plot, and a lot of five-star vocabulary words.  Switched tenses showed the passage of time, adjectives defined the mood, and tragedy struck more than once.  It was a work of art. 

She asked me to review her writing before she handed it in because she had greatly exceeded the limit of 4,000 words.  I read the piece for basic accuracy in grammar and spelling and made a few changes, but mostly I cut parts that weren’t integral to the story.  Accepting these edits was difficult for her, but we whittled it down to 4,021 words and she was happy.  Off the printer with a flourish, tidily stapled and tucked into her homework folder, in her eyes the story all but glowed.  She spent the next several days awaiting her teacher’s cries of delight.

The day my daughter received her corrected writing assignment from her teacher she didn’t mention it for several quiet hours.  Finally she laid it on my desk and told me her teacher hated her piece.  He had questioned her character development, claimed whole sections were jumbled, taken points off for having too many ideas, and he’d put questions marks everywhere!  He didn’t understand anything! 

I pointed out to her that while her teacher had questions and comments throughout, his overall perspective was that she had a lot of great ideas that may have worked better as a longer piece, and he’d given her an A.  But I think what my daughter wanted was unconditional love of her work, the same love she had for it, and I was reminded how difficult it is when the objects of our unconditional love are criticized.  It is hard to accept criticism, harder still to learn from it.  It is what strengthens us in the end, but I think when we’re putting our work out for other people to read, secretly most writers are still eleven.  Editors, be kind.