Let's face it, you're not the next Ernest Hemingway or Stephen King. Heck, when they started, Hemingway and King weren't the next Hemingway and King. Hemingway wrote a lot of mediocre journalism before he made it big, and King spent years pounding out scenes on an old typewriter set between his washer and dryer before he saw publication.
A lot of beginning writers (and midlisters, for that matter) think their first efforts are perfect, and will be snapped up by a big New York publisher for tens of thousands of dollars. A movie deal will come next, and literary stardom. Fame and wealth and hot women. . .
Wrong. Writing is hard, often thankless work. If it isn't its own reward then you shouldn't be doing it. Yes, you can get published and if you work at it long enough you probably will be, but if you're in it for the money, quit now and go into banking.
I've seen way too many self-styled "undiscovered geniuses" screech when anyone dares try to give them constructive criticism. Everyone needs criticism, and you need to learn how to take it. I can't calculate how helpful my critique partners have been to me, and I'm proud to say I've helped out a few myself. Your prose isn't perfect, my prose isn't perfect, even Hemingway's and King's prose isn't perfect (although Hemingway comes damn close) so try to look at your work with an objective eye.
And rewrite. I once met a guy who insisted that anyone who can't come out with perfect prose in the first draft isn't a real writer. Nonsense. Even Kerouac rewrote. The story of him pounding out On the Road straight onto the page is only partially true. Yes, he wrote it all in one long, benzedrine and booze-fueled week, but he had carefully planned out the entire book in his head in the preceding months. And the final published version is very different than what he wrote.
Writing means work, realism, and a dose of humility, even for the big names.
So keep at it, fellow writers. You're special, but you're not perfect.
I know I'm not perfect. I just do the best I can.
ReplyDeleteAnd you do pretty darn well!
DeleteAwesome post!
ReplyDeleteWriting is hard, often thankless work. If it isn't its own reward then you shouldn't be doing it. Yes, you can get published and if you work at it long enough you probably will be, but if you're in it for the money, quit now and go into banking.
(Even teaching pays more than most writers make)
I like the post a lot, Sean. You mention two of my favorites: Hemingway, and Kerouac, but I've also read some of King's works. All very different.
ReplyDeleteIn art school, critiques of your work and the art of critiquing was part of the course. Keeps the egos in line.
Good reminder.
I had a Classics professor who would give us a lecture on paper writing before every term paper was due. His most important piece of advice was, no sentence has a right to exist. Every sentence needs to justify itself. If it can't prove its worth to you, use the delete key and start over.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I'll quote Voltaire and state "The perfect is the enemy of the good". If you agonize and brow-beat yourself over every sentence, desperately searching for that perfect wording that's going to make a sentence "perfect", you're never going to finish what you started. Around where I work, we commonly mis-quote this as "Don't let perfect stand in the way of good enough", and by that we mean, you can't afford to never *do* anything because it isn't perfect, when you could do it and have it be good enough for what it needs to be.
Spot on. Although surely any writer thinking he/she is perfect is rare? I thought most of us were insecure. Bring on the critiques, I say! D
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I suppose for the majority it's more a case of arrogance covering up insecurity, although I've met a fair share of writers who did indeed think they're perfect. They tend not to write much, and tend to publish nothing.
DeleteSo true! One of the biggest fights in my (writing) family is the fact that I'm spending more than a year editing my book, while my grandmother (who's published) is set in her ways of writing and editing, but can't seem to crack into the British and US markets.
ReplyDeleteAnd then when they ask for crit and I give it, they can't understand that I dared to be critical.
In the mean time, I went in search of CPs because my family isn't critical enough of my writing.