A Matter of Confidence
This week I went through a process I have never gone through before, but am sure I will again.
The past few days I sorted through my work for the Associated Press Awards in the state of Ohio. In some ways this means I have been nominated for an award. Of course, I made the nomination, so to make such a claim would be, while accurate, quite hollow.
As mentioned earlier, this is the first time I have gone through this process, despite entering my third year as a professional writer.
I changed jobs around this time last year, making any submissions difficult.
What I found was that going through your work from the year is like looking through a high school yearbook. Only instead of wondering why your hair was so weird looking and questioning your taste in clothes (I write this while wearing a shirt from high school), you are wondering why you wrote certain sentences, why you put a comma in a certain place, and thinking that you made the wrong choice when your mother asked exactly what it was you were going to major in at college.
Awards are (I think) supposed to inspire confidence. Instead, I found mine shot.
“Can’t I write a damn paragraph without using “yet?” I yelled to no one in particular.
The Associated Press asks for six submissions for best writer. At first, I thought I’d have about 20 I’d want to send in. But after rattling through six months of stories, columns and features I had penned, I found myself with no more than three I thought were presentable.
Despite its frustrating moments, the experience wasn’t entirely a downer. I found an article I’d penned after a local coach resigned. I’d totally forgotten about it, but it seemed, seven months later, to be some of my strongest work.
That was perhaps the most interesting thing. I knew the selection process was coming, and had several stories in my head I wanted to submit. Of that list, none were right for the competition after closer scrutiny.
It was instead the articles I had discarded soon after writing them that seemed the best.
Perhaps there’s a deep theme to this, or a story about the ugly duckling that turns into a swan. I don’t know.
All I know is after going through over 50 pieces of work over the last year, I found a few things to be undeniable.
* The first is that I’m no Orson Welles, no child prodigy who can turn any ridiculous premise into Pulitzer Prize material. One has to be comfortable in their abilities, and I certainly am. What I’m not is brilliant. I still have a long way to go.
* The second is that despite going through this process, my focus cannot be lost. You don’t get into an industry to win an award. You get into it because you enjoy it or it satisfies a need. Perhaps Cher got into the movie business to get an Oscar. She even won one. But winning the Oscar didn’t make her a great actress. It just made her exceptional for a piece that she did. In the same way, winning an AP award won’t make me a great writer; it won’t prove it to me, or vindicate my two years in the business. It’s just icing.
* Third is that going through the selection process creates mind numbing issues and causes me to write therapy-inducing columns like this one. Maybe next year I’ll just let my father pick out my best work and be done with it. I trust his judgment better than my own, anyway.