What happened to your masterpiece, your perfect manuscript, your door to an award, a Pulitzer or even a Nobel?

After that first positive emotion, you start feeling sad, and that sadness gradually turns into anger and then you feel outraged. The problem gets worse if you start to see some truth into the comments written into your work. “Am I really this ignorant? How could I make so many mistakes? Why had I never heard about this before?  Why did I have to get embarrassed like this? Is this truly how things are?”...

Each comment on the page turns into agony. Each one reminds you that you failed and it hurts your ego, the thing that gets hurt the most in the process. You get sad and depressed, you feel like your stomach is empty and you wish you had never been born, or that you had never written anything.

To make matters worse, the manuscript can’t just lie there. There’s a contract, a commitment, a deadline. They expect you to solve all doubts, to approve or reject changes, to expand concepts and to clean the manuscript to take it to the next stage. 

My text was corrected: How do I interpret the comments?

You finally got to the last word. You write it and feel triumphant. Adrenaline rushes through your body, and you think your text is good, no matter what. You are proud, happy, and you feel successful. You can’t wait to send it to the editor. What will the editor say? You’re expecting praise, congratulations, patting. You hear the “Very good!” in your head, over and over.

In the meantime, that other person receives the material and takes his time to read it. It seems to be taking forever. Why hasn’t he sent it back already? Why isn’t he saying something? I already did my part, now I want him to do his. 

The manuscript comes back days, weeks or months later. But, what a surprise! Instead of getting congratulations, praise, wonder or being recognized as a genius, you find a manuscript filled with corrections: “Missing a page number”, “commonplace”, “empty expression”, “confusing”, “expand this”, “clarify this”, “contradiction”, “epistemological problem”, “check meaning”...

You find multiple words that are crossed out, new commas where you didn’t imagine there would be any, hundreds of syntax changes, new paragraphs, dissected paragraphs, and changes of order, annotations to include things you hadn’t foreseen, new sections or whole sections eliminated.