Like a love affair, I live with a story nearly every minute of days and weeks until I have polished and tweaked and changed and tweaked some more and then it makes no sense to me and I begin to find more and more fatal flaws and never want to see it again. The spectrum of passion, love to hate without ever knowing when I’ve crossed the line.
Sometimes, if the timing’s right, I will submit it either for a critique or for publication while I’m still in love. Then, the instant it’s out of my hands I am embarrassed by it.
I’ve been reading submissions to both Crapometer and Miss Snark’s latest query/first pages contest, and something unsettles inside me. Some of the writing is excellent, some of the stories are grabbing, but there are so very many writers who truly believe in themselves and I wonder how they can put so much into it without knowing, really knowing whether they have the talent or the story that needs to be told. And it makes me look closer at myself.
I think that in this, as in all things that require heart and soul bared, that self-confidence is not to be depended upon. I think honest feedback is more needed and less pats on the back. Encouragement is vital to the truly creative, but only when the skill is what may and can be improved. And the old "write for yourself" makes it a hobby. To write for others, to share, it must be outstanding. At some point, we have to decide for ourselves if it’s worth not only our efforts, but that of others as we ask them to read what we think is great writing. We need to learn and accept and keep struggling if it has that potential, or keep it to ourselves if it never will be.
That’s where my head’s at right now.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
*clap clap*
Well said.
I don’t think it’s about a writer having talent or having a story that needs to be told. I think it’s about telling the story that you have, and the rest is all incidental…
}:)
Easy for you to say, because you always come up with great story and a talent and skill to write it. But if you’ve seen what the millions of wannabe writers are producing, you’d get my point. Yes, everyone can write, but just a percentage write well. Should those who really aren’t talented keep at it? Of course! Who am I to tell them otherwise. But it just makes me look a lot closer at myself and wonder if I have the right to take up other people’s time and effort in asking them to read my own writings.
“Easy for you to say, because you always come up with great story and a talent and skill to write it”
I will accede to the first point, but the second is an unproven hypothesis.
“But it just makes me look a lot closer at myself and wonder if I have the right to take up other people’s time and effort in asking them to read my own writings.”
Absolutely! These people put themselves in the position of being editors; that is what they are there for. It’s not like you’re dragging people off the street and forcing them to read stories at needlepoint…
}:)
P.S. You’re not doing that, right???
Uh…I won’t anymore.