As a writer, I completely understand frustration in this statement. If you are a high school writer only, you may not. While teaching I saw plenty of high school writers. They wait until last conceivable moment to start, write down everything they can think of on topic at hand in no particular order, then race to teacher’s desk to fling paper at her, hoping it’s good enough for passing. These people are not writers of which I speak.

I’m speaking about writers who think all way through every word they put down, who cross out, delete, rewrite, re-think, edit, re-edit, and hone every inch of a manuscript before they let anyone else so much as hear idea presented in it. These are writers who research until their eyes bleed, think until their brain hurts, and generally torture themselves over every single word because it doesn’t just need to be “good,” it needs to be “perfect.”

Then after they can see no other place in entire work of oh, say 80,000 words, they heave a sigh of relief and acquiescence and place it into hands of someone else to read. In high school, these are kids who have been finished with first draft of their 250-word essay 40 minutes before bell rings, but who are still crossing things out and rewriting them even as they slide toward teacher who’s saying, “That’s it. Turn in your papers.”

It’s painful for them to turn their work over to someone else. It’s like a mother leaving her first baby with a sitter for very first time. They hope and pray reader will be gentle. They hope that when paper is returned, there are very few red marks if any at all. And above all, they hope they haven’t made any grievous errors that will make reader think they are a complete imbecile who should never have been given a pen and paper in first place.

When I was eleven, I was so fascinated with computers; building them, setting them up and troubleshooting them: you would have probably called me an obsessive nerd who woke up working on computers and sleeping with them. Everyday, I would read up on latest new hardware, or latest software so I knew exactly how they worked and exactly how to put it together. I felt that I was fairly competent to fix anything that was wrong with a computer.

Two years later, I decided that my life wasn’t all about computers and I shifted my focus to business; I stopped reading and updating myself on latest coolest things and I stopped building and repairing computers. When people would call me up to repair their computers, I politely mentioned that I was no longer in business and that my interest was else well. A year went by and my dad needed a new computer; and because he wanted it custom built, he asked me to build one for him, I agreed.