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My website seems to have spontaneously created this particular post, throwing up the headline with no particular content to share, and broadcasting it to the usual channels.

I originally came in to delete the post and take it down, then figured, what the hell? It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for today: I’ve just finished ten days straight of grading assignments, making comments on first chapters for forty-two different novels, and my brain is feeling rather scraped out and devoid of things worth saying.

The thing about marking creative work, as opposed to essays, is that it gets horribly repetitive. You don’t have time to explain everything that’s going wrong across three or four thousand words, which means you focus in on the stuff that will help the manuscript get to the next level. Inevitably, when dealing with new writers, this comes down to the same conversations about scene structure and developing beats and figuring out what your characters want, talking about the mechanics of good description and thinking about patterns of action and reaction when you start generating dialogue.

And the really hard part is trying to ensure your not treating every problem in a manuscript like it’s a nail and you’ve got a hammer, having to pause and ask yourself if it’s really a structural issue thats the biggest problem right now, or just some clunk dialogue that isn’t quite working as it should.

So you second-guess, and you fret, and you suck it up and go with your gut.

And you celebrate those little moments when someone hands in something where your focus shifts towards the upper end of the feedback hierarchy, and your attention moves to buffing out the dents rather than talking about ways to repair the engine or overhauling the engine entirely.