The more things change, the more they stay the same. And this is still something you can run into...so I'm revisiting it here. Enjoy!
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For years, I’ve enjoyed a certain ability to help people
with their writing. I have some skill in editing, some skill in storytelling, a
pernicious and truly frightening grasp of spelling and grammar…and I don’t
hesitate to use them.
But I didn’t come to this spot overnight. And no one does.
Which leads me to a few words about an incident I had recently.
If you spend enough time online, you get to know people.
Their styles. How they work, if they work, if they really care about writing or
if they’re just hanging out. Doesn’t take much more than oh, say, three or four
excursions into a chat with someone to tell where they are on the Writer
Spectrum.
Some of us don’t care if we write for anything but our own
amazement, and that’s fine. Many times, these people who’ve decided to do this
thing for fun are among the happiest of us (!)—but also, curiously enough, they
can tend to be the most understanding of the ups and downs of the writing life,
and just how hard it can be to make it in this business.
Maybe that acute understanding is precisely why they don’t
pursue it as a business/career. They know how hard it is, and they don’t want
to work that hard. God love ‘em—they do us all a great service with their
positive attitudes, their sheer enjoyment, and sometimes their safe shoulders.
(Not to mention their occasional chocolate!)
Then there are all the rest of us. We want to sell our work,
to progress in the craft of writing so that we eventually get a) past the form
rejection postcards, into the b) realm of longer notes, encouraging and
sometimes even signed by an editor…and inviting us to send something else (!),
and finally, c) to a sale. Or many sales (from my keyboard to God’s ears).
Those of us in this group are also in a wide spectrum of
ability and experience. We’re all over the place. But there are certain things
we learn, over time. We learn that our high school English teachers didn’t
necessarily know whether we could write. Those who thought we could, and those
who told us we couldn’t, are often equally right. It’s what we start doing
after high school that ends up counting. :-)
We learn that if we’re ever going to grow as writers,
someone besides our mothers and best friends needs to read what we do and offer
us feedback.
We learn that sometimes that feedback isn’t very polite, or
doesn’t spare our feelings. If we’re lucky, we learn that our worst “enemies”
probably help us grow the most.
We learn that sometimes that feedback is just plain wrong,
but it’s still worth listening to because it can often point to a potential
reader problem.
We learn which people in our lives are really good at
pinpointing what will improve and strengthen our work, and which of them aren’t
really good at that…yet. (This doesn’t mean they might not get good at it. This
whole craft is a work in progress.)
But above all…we learn that writing is work.
Note: this doesn’t mean it’s not fun, or that it need be
drudgery, or that it has to somehow “hurt” to be “real art.” Few things are
more irritating than hearing either whining about how “hard” the “artist’s
life” is, or how now that you’re “serious” about writing, “it’s not fun
anymore.” If you’re hurting, see a helper. If it’s not fun, get out of the
pool. Sometimes that’s the kindest thing you can do for yourself, not to
mention everyone else.
But make no mistake about the other side of this, either.
Writing is work. It’s hard work. It’s the second-most fun you can have with
your clothes on (music is first), but it’s also work. Succeeding in this work
takes time. And commitment. And effort.
It also takes something the athletes among us know
well—something called coachability.
And that’s where many people fall down on the job. They
simply aren’t coachable.
If you tell them their writing needs work, they tell you
they’ve done that work. Only problem is, the writing shows no
improvement. Which means that somewhere, there’s a disconnect. Somewhere in
there, they’re lying to themselves. And that special form of denial is not a
good place to spend your writing life.
I had an incident one weekend that illustrates this to a
tee.
A particular writer acquaintance of mine sent me a message
late on a Saturday night asking for advice/help/etc. We had a long IM
conversation, during which I got sent a link to the potential publisher she was
thinking of…and then a second link that I thought would take me to another
publishing site. Instead, it took me to a chat room where she was hanging out
with her friends.
Now, keep in mind, this is 11:30 PM and counting. And I’ve
been up and on the road that day since 5 AM. I’m in fact in my hotel, winding
down after Day One of some family stuff. Good family stuff, but still…tiring. I
don’t mind talking writing for a few minutes before I go to bed. And that’s
what I thought I was doing…talking one on one with this gal. For a few
minutes.
Instead, I end up in this room with these people
yakking—people who obviously think I’m there for a visit!—and I’m wondering
where the focus of the first gal went to.
So after pretty much resisting sticking around in the chat
room, I exchange a few other words of advice with her, and we call it a night,
okay on both sides. Or so I think, until I get home from my trip, boot up my
e-mail, and discover this woman has written me to tell me that I have done
something not even a destructive parent could…I have convinced her she has no
talent.
So after claiming 50 finished books, she is going to stop.
She's going to destroy it all, and stop writing forever, since she obviously is
never going to be published, because no one cares for anything she'd want to
say.
Boys and girls, can you spell overreaction?
What had I said to so totally finish her off?
That she needed to go back to her synopsis, strip back
everything that wasn’t central to her story, and see what she had left. She had
gone into numerous side trips, most of which were backstory, and I told her
that. I also said something along the lines of, “No one is going to care about
your characters unless you give us a reason to. So find those reasons. Tap into
those. There’s your story, not all this detail about haunted castles and ghosts
and curses and all the other stuff. Latch onto the story.”
I had good reason to say this. She had supposedly sent this
material to 30 other places, editors and agents, and she couldn’t figure out
why none wanted it. So I told her.
I wasn’t necessarily gentle about it, but neither was I
brutal. I was frank. The way I always am…and most of all, the way this
gal knows I am, because she knows me.
And I probably was less patient with her than I could have
been, had it not been 11:30 PM (when my body thought it was 12:30 AM!), had I
not been basically led down the garden path into this chatroom, where I had no
intention of being…
…and had this whole thing not been just another
manifestation of this gal’s lack of ability to take advice and actually use it
to improve.
You see, she was going to use my editorial services, not too
very long ago. She was going to pay for them and everything. (!) As soon as she
got a certain check she was waiting on, we were going to go for it.
That was December of 2005. She never executed that
agreement.
Prior to that, she sent me a query letter and synopsis and
asked my feedback. I was glad to give it. Only problem was, prior to her
getting the feedback, she sent the thing off, flaws and all. And then she was
surprised when it was rejected.
She has received critiques from many of us, specific,
pointed stuff, aimed at helping her get better. Only when she submits her
material to us again, supposedly revised…it’s no better.
This woman claims that at times she’s spent 12 hours a day
at the keyboard. But 12 hours a day at the keyboard is just exercise, and not
very good exercise at that, if you can’t discipline yourself to stop believing
your friends who say your work is “wonderful” and start believing people who
are really trying to help you, even if what they’re telling you will only “slow
you down” to put into practice.
The fact that those people see the same errors over and over
again should tell you something.
And that something isn’t that those people are too
picky.
Nor is it that anyone is saying you have no talent.
But raw talent does nothing for you unless you’re willing to
be coached. Really willing to be coached.
You also need to be willing to take the time to grow. Not to
try to force it, to try to adhere to some timetable you have in your head, or
the like. Goals are fine, but they take time to get to. And if you're not
willing to give yourself and your work that time, you'll only spin your wheels.
As my dh and I learned long ago in music school, it’s
not just how long you practice. It’s how well. It’s how
intelligently.
If you claim to want publication, part of that intelligence
is a generous dose of humility and patience to go with a work ethic that could
shame a Puritan. If you can’t muster up the intelligence, the humility, the
patience, the work ethic and give it all time enough to take root,
for growth to occur…maybe the answer is that you really do need to
quit the "business" end of this and just do it for entertainment.
But the one thing you don't have the right to do…is blame
someone else for that.
Needless to say, I won’t be trying to help this person
anymore. That’s a shame, but it’s also freeing. As I said to my own crit
partner, “There may be a lot of clueless people in the writing world—but boy,
is it nice to know I don’t have to fix ‘em all!”
Amen, and amen.
Life's too short to play denial games. If you aren't going
to run with the big dogs, it's okay to rest on the porch. Just don't project
onto other people reasons for decisions you make yourself...either by
your conscious effort or by your unwillingness to do the work needed to get to
where you say you want to go.
Thoughts?
Janny
