Meaning and Responsibility

What does meaning mean?

In response I’m spending more time on each piece. Last Thursday’s post went through five drafts. It’s not the time and effort spent on multiple drafts that bothers me. It’s that fact that the more drafts I do, the drafts I want to do. The more things I find to “correct”, the more I assume there are other things that need correcting. (Like that comma back there that I initially left out.)

So I go from two drafts to five, and it was only a deadline that prevented further revisions. I had to convince myself that it was good enough. Not an easy accomplishment for a flawed perfectionist.

Then we have meaning, which is what I started to write about. On this I have oddly little stress. People will read my stuff and come to their own conclusions. What it means to me might not be what it means to them. They might not even care enough to assign meaning.

I guess the question is; What does a writer expect from their audience? Do we want praise, comments, criticism? Or is it enough to know that people are reading what we wrote? For larger pieces I have a wonderfully honest first reader, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome by having her look at every little piece of text that leaks out of my brain.

 

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