Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Alphabet Soup - C

C is for careless. It's a word that my former piano teacher would yell every time I made a mistake. It wasn't because I didn't practice enough, it wasn't because I wasn't good, it was because I was careless. It wasn't just in playing the piano either, I was always a careless person.

I've lost thousands of points for not checking my work, for forgetting to write that negative sign, for dotting only half the i's, even for forgetting to write my name on a few things. Carelessness has always been been an annoying imp, one that affects me in the small but consistent ways.

So nowadays I spend a lot of time correcting my mistakes, painstakingly reading and rereading, checking and rechecking, every word, every number, every darkened bubble. It's an obsessive hobby of mine. As soon I turn in that assignment, I want to turn around and run back to the professor's desk asking if I could have one more look at it, just to see if everything is alright. Sometimes it is and other times I'm not quite as lucky.

Correcting mistakes has become both a hobby and a chore of mine, and while it's usually a lonely exercise, my obsessive self doubt has surprisingly found me a few friends. It's because of my carelessness, my ineptitude, and my unhealthy desire to fix what might not even be wrong that has caused me to spend a good amount of time with some of the best people that inhabit this big blue world.

They weren't like me though, they had a good deal of confidence in their work. They only had to go over things once and rarely twice. No, they suffered from a different malady; procrastination. Over time, this disease spread over to me too. With them, I checked nothing, but that was mainly due to the fact that I was too busy enjoying their company.

Our yearbook was riddled with mistakes. But this time, it was due to more than carelessness. It was what it was because we had too much fun being careless.

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