Criticism and Change

It is currently spring break for me, so I have the week off from school. What most people do on spring break is to go out and have fun, usually at the beach. I, on the other hand, work on homework. One assignment in particular is my final portfolio for my creative writing class. The assignment is to provide a creative response to one of the selected pieces (I chose Dante's Inferno), some comments made from our workshops throughout the semester, and 25-30 pages of revised original work. As I've spent the past two days working on combining what I want to include in my 25-30 pages, I realized I've written a lot more poetry than I thought. I have also realized that my fiction writing is rather terrible. I know it might be better than what I think of it, but it still needs a massive amount of work.

Since the 25-30 pages are supposed to be revised, I have been going back and changing things that really need to be changed in my poems. However, whenever I get to a poem that has been workshopped or one that has had constructive comments made, I find myself stuck. One poem I took the constructive criticism and changed the poem, while still keeping its original message. The other poem, I cannot bring myself to change. I did make changes to the punctuation because the comments made about it made grammatical sense, but I couldn't change the actual words written on the page. I don't really know why I can't alter the poem, and it's not that I disagree with the criticism of the poem. I do agree with the criticism. Things need to be changed in the poem in order for the details within it to provide clarity to the reader.

Before this blog post turns into an essay, I think I'll get right to the point. I know that when you workshop a piece, you can choose to take the criticism about your work and revise your piece with it or you can leave it as is. Whenever we receive criticism we usually change in order to appease those making the comments. However, it is okay to go against it and leave something alone. With that being said, I believe that I will leave my poem as is because I simply cannot do otherwise. For whatever reason I can't change the poem, whether it be because I don't want to lose what the poem already has or because of what the poem is about, I know that it is okay. I suppose the "life lesson" I'm trying to point out is that it is okay to not change. Even if we're criticized into thinking that something could be better, we can still see the strength in what is already there. I believe that this doesn't just apply to writing. Sure, writing is about deciding whether or not to utilize criticism, everyday people can make the same decision. We can decide to change because someone says something about us that we don't like, or we can stand out and be different. I guess it's all about perspective.

Anyways, I didn't intend for this post to become deep or have any meaning behind it, but hey, the words just came out of my brain. I hope my thoughts on this help anyone who feels like criticism can be too much sometimes. Once again, thank you for reading.