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Joined: 5/7/2011
Posts: 35
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I was having dinner at a local pub with a group of friends and aquaintances. As
the course of the evening progressed, the topic of my future book release came
up. During the conversation, a nice lady commented how she had written multiple
books, but was too terrified to have them published. I WAS SHOCKED! I understand
the fear of rejection, but I'm more terrified of
regret. Everyone has a story within, and can put their imagination or
experiences on paper. Will there be rejection? probably. Will you be
forced to step outside your comfort zone from time to time? most
likely. But if you have a story to tell, and have committed your thoughts
to paper, then it deserves the opportunity to be seen by the world. My advice
to the lady that night is the same to all aspiring writers...take a chance. What fears you the most about having your seen?
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
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I'm guilty of this, I have two manuscripts that are in first draft form just sitting in a virtual locker. In my case it's not fear of rejection, but just one of pride. They aren't up to a standard that I feel comfortable with sharing them at. I've only been writing a year or so and when I look at the first book I wrote I cringe. The story is fine, but you can see my learning curve as I figured out how in the heck this is all done.
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Joined: 4/28/2011
Posts: 60
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I'm the same way. I have extremely high standards for myself, higher than I probably have for others, and I don't like to share my work unless it comes somewhere near the high bar I set for myself.
And, yes, there is definitely a learning curve. The first novel I attempted to write was way back when I was in high school. I don't know where it is now, but I can remember I hadn't yet figured out you don't have to describe every moment of every day. I'm not quite sure why it took me so long to figure that out, especially since I've always been a voracious reader. I'd certainly be mortified now if others were to read it. And now I'm wondering where that thing is and if the ink from the dot matrix printer I used to print it is even still legible.
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Joined: 5/7/2011
Posts: 35
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Cast aside agents, critics, and publishers. In the end...we are our worst critics. It's somewhat akin to hearing a recorded sound of your own voice. We always cringe when we hear ourselves played back, but this is the sound that everyone around us hears. Think of your writing in that light. You will find the perception of others to be quite different than the "cringe" you are feeling. Start with a "soft" audience; immediate family and loved ones. Then move to the "warm" audience; friends and acquaintances that have reading interests simliar to the genre you're writing. You will find their critiques to be not so...brutal. Be mindful of what they say and see if there is a trend among them all. That could be a launching point for any possible adjustments/revisions. Sometimes setting high standards for yourself results in paralysis. Get your stuff out there...
Best of luck,
Jack
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Joined: 3/4/2011
Posts: 58
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Jack, your friends and loved ones are your "soft" audience? Heh. Mine are my harshest critics. Which I love.
On to the topic, I've always shared my writing with others: family, classmates, friends. Most would say nice things. A few would not.
When I first switched from being a voice major to being a creative writing major in college, my first creative writing teacher read a short story of mine and told me to go back to voice. I was upset for about a day. Then I got pissed off and wrote a better story. She said she was wrong and retracted her statement.
Now, many years later, I'm represented by a great agent, and my manuscript is out on submission.
If you want to write for your own enjoyment, that's fine. But if you want more, then you have to take that first step and show it to people. I never had any particular fears. Maybe that was simple naivete on my part. But harsh critiques simply drive me to write better, and I wouldn't have gotten anywhere without taking the risk of rejection.
Okay, I take that back. I did have one fear, that I wouldn't be able to come up with another novel-length story if my first one didn't make it to the big time. Well, I've written two and a half more since then. Granted, having people around who encouraged me helped a lot, but I wouldn't have found those people if I'd never shared my work in the first place.
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Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
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There are many terrors and risks involved in showing your work:
(1) Getting called out on errors of continuity, characterization, punctuation, grammar and syntax, pacing, style, POV, theme, plot, setting, etc. The errors a writer can make—and be blind to in the writing—are legion. Yes, I’m grateful when they’re caught by an eagle-eyed editor or other careful reader, but I’m always—always!—mortified that I didn’t catch the errors myself.
I feel somewhat better knowing that the pros also make their fair share of mistakes. To name but three examples: (a) Stephen King once said to an associate who’d asked to see his novel-in-progress (close paraphrase): “Sure, you can see it. Right after it goes through my agent, the proof-reading editor, the line editor, the editor-in-chief and my wife.” SK has told the anecdote of the close associate who was reading his proof of Salem’s Lot, only to explode in laughter. When a quizzical SK inquired as to the reason for this seemingly-unwarranted hilarity, the friend pointed out the error: in his manuscript, SK had referred to the time-honored Lot tradition of “peasant hunting” in the surrounding hills and woods! (b) Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece of noir, The Big Sleep, is marred by the unresolved death of Owen Taylor, chauffer. The film director Howard Hawks, after pouring over the book looking for clues as to who caused this demise, finally called Chandler to resolve the dangling loose end. Hawks: “Who killed him?” Chandler: “Hell if I know.” (c) William Shakespeare wrecked a ship on the coast of land-locked Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale.
So yes; I make my fair share of mistakes, but I am comforted by the fact that “The Greats” make their fair share as well.
(2) Getting called out on errors of continuity, characterization, punctuation, grammar and syntax, pacing, style, POV, theme, plot, setting, etc.—when you are right! Possibly the only thing more maddening than embarrassing yourself by making a mistake is to have your work misread, misconstrued, unappreciated and/or wrongfully critiqued by philistinish brutes, ideologues of every stripe and hue and tone-deaf martinets militantly beholden to certain hallowed schools of “correct writing.” And then there are the myriad tabula rasa types, whose ignorance is exceed only by their arrogance, who presume to comment on matters literary and bibliographic that they know nothing—and I mean absolutely nothing—about.
To give but a few of the most egregious examples from my own life-lived experience: (a) I once shared with a male coworker a short story I’d written about the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto as experienced through the eyes of a young girl. This knuckle-dragging, anti-Semitic (I didn’t know the depths of this man’s pathology then) sociopathic monster of a misogynist handed the manuscript back to me with a curious little smile and said, “I enjoyed it, but couldn’t you have worked in a rape scene? The story needs a rape scene.” (b) Some years ago in Chicago I read aloud a science-fiction short at a juried critique. The feedback from three of the panel (two writers and an editor) was tough but fair, but the third writer went out of his way to be condescending, sarcastic and destructive in his criticism. (No names, but let’s just call him, “Pretentious Goggle-eyes”. Juvenile, yes, but it makes me feel better. . . .) So heated and vituperative was this man’s response to my work that he couldn’t resist adding insult to injury: on the written portion of the critique, the story was rated on a 1-5 scale in five different categories. He crossed out the ones (the lowest rating) and penciled in zeroes for all five categories. It was hard to breathe for awhile after that. . . . (c) I could cite innumerable examples of peoples’ comments on my writing (spoken and written) that are simply head-scratchers. In no particular order (and without attribution) here are a few of my own personal favorites: “Try not to use any words longer than three syllables.” – “Write only what you know.” – “For god’s sakes don’t write what you know; what you know is boring.” – “Don’t write science-fiction, horror or fantasy. People will think you’re weird.” – “Stick to writing science-fiction, horror or fantasy; you’re simply not skilled enough to write mainstream literary fiction.” (As if that were easier! It takes more skill, not less, to produce involving, intelligent and original genre writing. IMHO.)
It is tough to admit when you are wrong, but it can be even tougher for the struggling, unknown writer to understand when and where they have gotten it right in their approach to style, tone, pacing, thematic material and divers other elements of the craft.
(3) Recognizing that despite your best efforts to concretize, from without the whirling maelstrom of inchoate emotions, half-formed thoughts, fleeting visions, primal urges and subconscious drives that is the human mind—your mind, in all its idiosyncratic, iconoclastic glory—that you have failed to capture the totality of the experiences, insights and epiphanies that moved you and/or your characters. In this sense all writing is failed writing. I argue failed because in writing, that noble but doomed effort to concretize and set down on paper, in cunningly-fashioned order, the words that will make manifest and fully-realized our experiences (real or imagined) to another, failure is all but assured. And how could it be otherwise, really? The writer is attempting to take the raw material of experiential knowledge and convert it (with no loss of data, if you’ll pardon the computer metaphor) and share it with another. Just how is this miracle of communication to occur? How is one person (or story character) going to share with another his thoughts and feelings, visions and voices, wild conjectures and iron-clad proofs (so asserted) of eternal verities, along with all the myriad, multi-form branchings and intertwinings of his own personal psychology and religio-philosophical outlook? Mind you, the goal here is to communicate with every nuance of emotional shading and cognitive function left intact, from the writer to the reader. It can’t be done. It can’t be done because of what serves as the vehicle for this mind-to-mind, spirit-to-spirit communication: concrete signifiers of the abstract, black tick marks on a white background: words on the page. I oftentimes think the gods must howl with laughter at the hubris of man. “Communicate with another”, indeed!
All which is to say: I never stop trying. But the risk and fear in showing your work to others is in learning just how deeply and profoundly you have failed to move another; in hearing first-hand how you failed to make real and emotionally meaningful for the reader the experiences that so challenged, moved, motivated and changed your characters.
It’s a hell of a thing, this writing business. It’s even more terrifying and problematic to expose yourself in public, having no defense but the words you’ve already committed to the page.
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Joined: 5/7/2011
Posts: 35
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Fabulous insight, Carl. Thanks for contributing!
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Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
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You're welcome.
Thank you, Jack, for starting such an interesting discussion!
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Joined: 3/11/2011
Posts: 29
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For years I would only show one or two people my fiction. Poetry i would share, but my fiction, I felt sucked so bad I didn't want anyone to see it. Well, I got older, wiser and a little bit better at the fiction thing. I blogged constantly and had no problem sharing that with the world. Occasionally I'd throw a few bits of fun fiction up on the blog, but nothing of substance. Then, a few years ago, I started doing script work for a performance troupe and that forced me into letting people read my work. Since then, I've been giving my fiction to friends for beta testing....even got up the nerve to query agents with my dreck novel. I learned from that experience and wrote another novel and actually landed an agent. Right now editors that I have immense respect for are looking at my work. While that's daunting, I'm more excited about it. Obviously, with this site, I've posted work for public critique...
...what do I fear?
It's odd...but I feel like I've pulled the wool over someone's eyes... like the people who like my writing must be so snowed.. My fear is that someday people will get wise that I'm (as my friends like to call me in jest) "a talentless ass-dragging sea creature" and tell me I should just chop off my fingers to save the world from the possibility of ever writing again.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 51
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I think for me, the only issue that people bring up a lot that I'll never understand is the allergic reaction to publishing the first full-length novel you've ever written. It's been proven so, -so- many times that a debut novel that's also the first full-length piece written by that author then goes on to superstardom, so why not anyone else?
As for showing it to people I know, that tends to get a bit interesting. I'm extremely lucky in that I have a Lit undergraduate for a girlfriend, and she's incredibly insightful. I do however run into family members who ask me repeatedly to 'send them the manuscript', and that I don't know what to do with. It's clear they don't read SF, it's clear they're a little averse to swearing, or dark themes and events, and I know they're only going to hate it even if the writing isn't terrible. It's a nasty situation to be in.
And Carl? That was one of the best responses to any forum question I've ever seen. I was reading parts of that out loud to my girlfriend, it was that interesting and humorous. If you ever write a writer's memoir, with that voice, you'd be doing us all a disservice by not publishing it.
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Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
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Thanks for the "thumbs-up" on my comments, CY Reid!
I'm enjoying reading the responses from other writers; Jack has started an interesting discussion here.
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 214
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Call me the strange person on this thread, but I don’t mind getting called out on anything, as long as the criticism is constructive, makes sense and is given in the spirit of trying to make my writing better. I write for a living. I’ve been working with editors (in newspapers, magazines and more recently, online publications) for more than twenty years; if I were that thin-skinned, I would have quit the first time I had a nasty editor call me to the carpet on a feature story that was subpar. ☺
Writing fiction comes from a more personal place, that much is true; however, it’s also product. Product designed to sell copies in one form or another – either digitally or printed on dead trees. If I want to create a marketable product, I have to know how to hone my technique – this means always learning and keeping an opening mind. It also means parting company with things that I thought would work and didn’t. And it sometimes means doing research and targeting a specific niche market. Heck, if the next big craze in romance were writing about furries, I’d be all over that like white on rice.
I’m handicapped insofar that I studied literary fiction writing, not genre. This will do things to your genre style that are unimaginable. It wrecks your ability to plot, to structure sentences, to characterize and to make that piece of writing comparable to others of its kind. Genre readers are the best audience to notice when something about my novel doesn’t work.
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Joined: 5/7/2011
Posts: 35
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Thanks to everyone for contributing!
**In response to Jamie's inquiry:
Surprisingly, my fear is the same as yours. I've had perma-grin ever since being tapped by a publisher, with the only fear being that once the dust settles, and the book is out there, I will be exposed as a literary buffoon. The insecure vision of standing naked before a crowd of people while they mock you surfaces like the days of adolescence. How do I deal with it? I just keep writing. In my case, I pitched my novel as part of an ongoing series. Being in the "hurry up and wait" phase of the publishing process, I asked "What now?" The reply was simply..."Keep writing...and get your 2nd book to me." I could wallow in self-loathing like the best of them, but that's unproductive. Will there be those who smirk at my work? Absolutely! But I have to keep writing, for I love it more than any potential criticism.
** In response to Carl:
I'm glad you're enjoying the topic. There are no more excuses for not exposing your content to the world. Small Presses (which I belong) are obtaining reputable mention for their authors as well as turning sales. The stigma of Self-publishing has also deteriorated with the advent of e-publishing. One can have a fulfilling literary career, or side-gig without relying solely on the large publishing Houses. It's a great time to be an author, and I'm excited for myself and all those who are apart of this journey.
*** In response to Lisa Marie
You might feel handicapped from time to time; but what a wealth of knowledge you have! And I must admit...all writing is personal, regardless of it being genre or literary. It's psychology 101. No matter what you're writing, a part of you comes out on that paper. Doesn't matter if you're writing a business newsletter or blogging about clothes...a shadow of you is out there. Keep listening to your genre audience, but most importantly...be mindful of the muse within. (Even when she wants to wake you up at 2 in the morning)
Oceans of love to all!
Jack
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