To give up or to soldier on is the question...

Exactly. I'm in the over-40 club and my work still sucks.

First drafts, at any rate. It's the second, third, and fourth drafts that suck progressively less. HOWEVER, I will reiterate the tough love aspect here--if writing is truly what you love, you don't need anyone's permission or approval to continue doing it. There's nothing wrong with getting a pat on the back every now and again, but the decision--the DRIVE--has to be yours.

I've been writing since I was 7. The thought of NOT writing has never crossed my mind.

Not.

Once.

Evah.

*shrug* Might want to think about that for a bit, young one. Good luck.

James D. Macdonald said:

Finish your book.

Start another.

Repeat.

The time to post in SYW (or let others see it in a live workshop) is at the second-or-third draft stage.

Click to expand...

And the prophet descended from the mount and spake thus. His words of wisdom raced across the electronic equilibrium burning with the liquid fire of forbidden knowledge. In the cities below the masses wailed in pleasure at being chosen to hear his message.

Seriously. Dramatics aside. The man knows what he's talking about.

If you haven't done so already, go peruse the Learn Writing With Uncle Jim thread. Common sense advice, facts, and no bull, well only a little.

If you learn nothing else You'll learn how to make a great Key Lime pie, play chess and how to amaze your friends and family with magic tricks.

How many best-selling, award-winning, multi-published authors who are in their teens and early 20s can you name?

Writing gets better with age. That's a fact.

Word of advice: Save your work! You're at an age where you can gather so much perspective on yourself and your writing, that you will have a great advantage when it comes time to decide on the way you write.

And the share your work forum is great. It really does work.

This week I learned how I wrote my best in writing by looking at one of the many posts I made. It turned out to be from a horror novel I started in 2006 (which I titled the post: Unsure about character backstory if your interested in seeing what I'm talking about) and gave up on it when I was maybe a little over 30,000 words in. The comment was that she really enjoyed reading it and the style of writing was interesting. There were no correcting or negative comments about the piece. I followed up on that comment now years later and reviewed all the chapters related to it (nearly most of what I wrote) and finally saw the light. I'm ecstatic over it.

So save your work, and get critiqued. Review them when you have a variety of things you've tried and then you'll be able to have a good idea about what your doing.

Disclaimer: I think I know what I'm doing now.

I have Absolute Write to thank for that. I wouldn't know what I know now about my first novel attempt if I had never posted. I would still be lost in my own world finding a way to outdo myself in writing.

Moving to Roundtable.

Keep in mind, too, that from my experience, the more you write, the sharper you write. A piece you wrote at the age of 14 will clearly be inferior to a piece you just wrote at the age of 24. So keep on writing. I assure you, you'll notice a definite change in your plotting, character development, story development, EVERYTHING, the more you write. Keep thinking of new ideas. Jot 'em down. Let your mind go, let it ride. Flesh out a novel. Put it down. Love it, live it, learn from it. Then, the magical step--the step that liberates us all--SUBMIT IT. And just hope it's something fresh in the eyes of an agent or publisher .

Okay, I went over and read the two things you had shared. You definitely should soldier on--you've got some interesting ideas. And, yes, you could use some skill-sharpening (and gosh, if you're only 17, you've got loads of time to do that!)

Now here is some advice from a hack writer old enough to be your Mom:

A) In future, I want to encourage you to assume that anything that does not say 'STOP WRITING IMMEDIATELY! YOU HAVE NO ABILITY! YOU MUST LEARN BASIC GRAMMAR BEFORE YOU WRITE ANOTHER WORD!' is simply part of an ongoing dialogue about how you can improve as a writer.

Seriously. Don't be discouraged by critiques, even very pointed ones. As others have said, this is not a business for the thin-skinned.

B) Keep writing. The more you do it, the easier it gets.


Good luck!

I'd love to see a sample of your writing.

Got anything that's around 1000 words long or less? (maybe a little longer, give or take)

I agree with all of the above. If writing is something you love, you should DEFINITELY stick with it! At 17, the whole world is in front of you. You still have sooo much to learn. But writing is a learing process, no matter what your age. You will continue to grow and improve and learn new things, even at age 20, 30, 50, 75! Hell, Stephen King probably STILL learns something new about writing with every book he churns out.

The key is to keep on swimming. If you just give it up, you'll never know how great you could've been. Writing takes a ton of blood sweat and tears, but it's soooo worth it. It's possible that nothing will ever come of your writing, you may pour your heart and soul into your writing, and NEVER get anything published, but that's not supposed to be the point in writing anyway.
You write because you love it, because writing has infected your blood and now you can't not write. At this age, you write for yourself, for the pure joy of it, for the need of it, and for the challenge of self improvement with each new word you put down on the page.

If it's meant to be, it'll come to you. If it's not, then go pour yourself into something else you feel passionate about. But no matter what, just keep trying.

And I've said it before, but as far as any kind of critiquing goes, look at it this way:

If the criticism doesn't say, THIS SUCKS! YOU SHOULD BURN IT!

You can only go UP from there!
ANYTHING more than THOSE words is hopeful!
It gives you something you can use to help improve your skills and your writing.

When you look at it that way, there ARE no discouraging crits! Only helpful ones!

*Keep your chin up, do it for yourself, and keep on swimming, no matter what you choose to do with your time and interests.

Even if it feels like you're swimming against the current, and you don't know if you're getting anywhere at all, or if what you're swimming sooo hard toward is going to get you anywhere or lead to anything, you still gotta just keep swimming!!!!!!!*

I'm with Neurofizz. Do the rewrites. That is the most useful exercise possible to improve your writing. After you've spent a fair bit of time thinking hard about how to change telling into showing, for instance, you find yourself getting it right the first time. And then you get to work on something else. Speaking from personal experience.

Read lots of good stuff. It will help form your ear and sensibilities so that your writing rises to meet it. It's like an athlete. If he wants to improve, he plays with people better than himself.

Mad Geek,

I think you will find that even if you do try to give up, you won't be able to. You may decide, "Oh, that's it!" and throw your pen and notebook across the room (or perhaps your laptop computer) determined never to utter a creative word again. But it won't work. Eventually the ideas will start spinning again, spiraling around and around, until the only way to release the creative pressure is to write them down.

So, you have no choice *but* to soldier on. It's who you are.

You don't expect to play Mozart the first time you sit down at the piano do you? It's part creativity, part craft. Take time to learn it and allow yourself room for improvement. Don't give up, you're way ahead of the game.

I can tell you this. When you submit work to be critiqued, there will be some negative comments. Heck, Steinbeck could post something and get smacked around a little. Seriously, try your best not to take anything too personally.

However, you're 17. You have college ahead of you, and so much education both in and out of the classroom. You are going to go through so many changes in the next 10 years, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you have this passion, ignoring it will not help you. You must answer the call, weather you come to rival Stephen King's success or not.

Sheesh, I've been over thirty for thirty years

As the others said, keep writing. I happen to be eighteen (just turned in March) and my writing. . . heh, well, I've got my fair share of kinks to work out, too.

I went through the same things you are. More than once, too. The best test to see if you should soldier on or give up is to stop writing. Don't do any more writing than you have to. Ignore story ideas that spring at you. When you read, just read for mindless entertainment. Look at other people's works posted on the internet. Does your mind wander over the style used, the characters, plot, setting? Can you do these things? No? Then soldier on.

The most important part is: can you stop writing?

Posting work on SYW can be a very discouraging experience (which is why I, as a coward, don't post very much). Critters will rip apart what you thought was absolutely perfect. However, it's also their job to rip it apart. Approach an SYW critique with that thought in mind and you might find it a bit less stressful. . . or not. It still hurts to get your prose shredded.

Although I think writers should decide for themselves whether or not they should keep writing, I have told some people to stop writing because it was becoming apparent that writing made these people miserable. Why they kept going at it, I don't know. It's kind of like planting your head in a wall over and over, despite the headaches, thinking that someday, you'll break through that wall and enter the land of happycakes. It doesn't make sense.

I've always found it strange how a critique--no matter how carefully worded--can shatter us. I think it's worse the younger you are, because you have this typical adolescent pride that nothing but experience can remove. I'm not saying you, I, nor anyone else in our age group is arrogant. What I mean is that with youth comes a bit of overconfidence in our abilities because they haven't been tested yet.

Let yourself be ripped down, then build up again stronger. I think my writing improved exponentially after a few stinging critiques (not here--one of the critiques I'm referring to consisted of one word: "piss").

To sum up: keep trying if it makes you happy. If not. . . find something else to do. There are a ton of other hobbies that are probably a lot less stressful and just as fun.

Write because you want to or stop because you do not.

There is one and only one good reason to write, because you want to write. There is one and only one good reason to stop writing, because you do not want to write anymore.

If you are writing to try to please others, you won't last. If you are quitting to please others, you won't be happy.

Now, if you are just discouraged because people here or anywhere else criticize your writing when they see it, be happy somebody cares enough to respond to you honestly. Most publishers will not. They will just reject it.

But most important of all, don't believe you have to agree with everything any critic says. Arthur C. Clarke once said if he had waited until everyone who saw his manuscript thought it was perfect to get it published, he never would have been published. A large part of editing is personal opinion. Writers from beginners to experts will disagree over what is 'right' until the end of time. (Just look at the AW Novel Writing thread on dialog tag use for example!)

You can also find small writing venues that are less demanding and more fun to bolster your ego a little. Join a club with a newsletter and write for it for example.