Does anyone feel like giving up??

Writing isn't easy.

Giving up is.

Writing and editing and writing more and editing more take time, perseverence, thick skin, and an eye toward constant improvement. Don't read critiques of your writing and cringe and hide. Decipher them, break them down to their bones, suck the marrow from every comment and see how its flavor sits on your tongue, how it helps you understand what others discover or fail to discover in your stories.

And learn. And keep learning.

And write. And keep writing.


-Michelle

kristi26 said:

How do you choose whose advice to listen to and whose to ignore?

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For me, I sense it in my gut. When I receive advice that makes my story better, it's like an "A-ha! Why didn't I see that before?" moment. If the advice is useless, I don't get that same feeling.

MeowGirl said:

For me, I sense it in my gut. When I receive advice that makes my story better, it's like an "A-ha! Why didn't I see that before?" moment. If the advice is useless, I don't get that same feeling.

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It's pretty much the same thing for me. It's a real lightbulb moment when the advice is good. Kind of embarrassing, but still very helpful.

That said, I feel like giving up quite often. Thing is, I can't give up. I just keep going, and I hope that one day, I'll be good enough at this that I'll know it without anyone telling me.

In the meantime, it's certainly not wasted time. It's time spent learning the craft.

kristi26 said:

The trouble is, everyone has a different opinion. Some say the story is good, it needs this. Then others say the story would be better if it had that. And then there's the one that says, "wow, this is awful but if your MC was a flying monkey wearing a pink leotard and shiny silver wig, then you'd have something!" That last person sounds so convincing and like they really know what they're talking about. How do you choose whose advice to listen to and whose to ignore?

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That's the point where you have to chew on the advice a bit, suck it down, and see how it settles in your stomach. The hardest thing about receiving crits is figuring out what to do with them. Most importantly, do not blindly obey your critiques. If you don't understand why somebody is suggesting a change, research the issue and ask questions until you do understand it. Then, with full understanding, make a plan for how you want to fix your story or if you even want to fix it.

It may take several drafts or several stories before some points finally make sense (I have a number of short stories in my "Will Never See the Light of Day" folder which I thought were very good when I wrote them and for months after). Another method is to try critiquing other stories and make it a point to give at least one suggestion for improvement for every story you critique. Sometimes during the act of critically evaluating the words of others, we find enlightenment into our own strengths and weaknesses.

The main point is if you give up on even trying to understand what is being said, your growth will probably slow. Much of being a writer is about understanding: understanding the world, the people in it, and how everything fits together into these things we call stories. It's also about knowing you will always need to grow, to learn, to become something more than yourself. It's about the realization that no story is perfect. There is always one more improvement, one last tweak, one last shifting of the prose. Even when you're done, you're not really done.

So mark down the major issues brought up in your critiques and start researching them more in-depth. Take any example you can, rip it into pieces, and put it back together again. Question, question, question until you understand.


-Michelle

kristi26 said:

The trouble is, everyone has a different opinion. Some say the story is good, it needs this. Then others say the story would be better if it had that. And then there's the one that says, "wow, this is awful but if your MC was a flying monkey wearing a pink leotard and shiny silver wig, then you'd have something!" That last person sounds so convincing and like they really know what they're talking about. How do you choose whose advice to listen to and whose to ignore?

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I had one story where more than one person remarked that they just couldn't connect and get into the story. It didn't feel immediate. My first reaction was "What is wrong with you people? I'm beating my MC up and you don't care?" So, I posed a question very similar to your's here to a different group that I belonged to and got a range of answers. Anyway, I set the story and the comments on it aside. Six months later I went back to it, read through it again, and realized that the problem with the story was that I had written it in passive voice. While the commenters had picked up on there being something off on the story, they had not pointed out that I had used passive voice. So, what I learned from that experience is that while the commenters might not know what the problem is, they usually have found a potential area that could be improved upon.

Though the commenter who recommends changing the MC to a flying monkey wearing a pink leotard, I think you can safely ignore that one.

If you give it to five people and all five have different suggestions/opinions, you're safe to go with your gut. If you give it to five people and three or four of them have the same opinion, you need to re-read drachin8's posts and question, question, question 'til you understand.

Ol' Fashioned Girl said:

If you give it to five people and all five have different suggestions/opinions, you're safe to go with your gut. If you give it to five people and three or four of them have the same opinion, you need to re-read drachin8's posts and question, question, question 'til you understand.

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I'd like to make an addendum to "if five people have five different opinions": be sure to evaluate the core of the opinion, not just the actual suggestion. If you have five different people saying you need to do five different things to your opening paragraph, then even if they all suggest something different is wrong with the opening, the core of their opinion is that something isn't working, thus they become the same opinion (just five different approaches to trying to figure out what the heck is off for them).

Which sort of ties into Beach Bunny's comments that your critiquers may not be quite sure what is wrong any more than you are, but they will hopefully at least be able to point out that something is off in a section. And provide you with their best guess as to what. It is up to you in the end to actually figure out what needs fixing and if anything needs fixing. Thus the question, question, question.


-Michelle

drachin8 said:

I'd like to make an addendum to "if five people have five different opinions": be sure to evaluate the core of the opinion, not just the actual suggestion. If you have five different people saying you need to do five different things to your opening paragraph, then even if they all suggest something different is wrong with the opening, the core of their opinion is that something isn't working, thus they become the same opinion (just five different approaches to trying to figure out what the heck is off for them).

Which sort of ties into Beach Bunny's comments that your critiquers may not be quite sure what is wrong any more than you are, but they will hopefully at least be able to point out that something is off in a section. And provide you with their best guess as to what. It is up to you in the end to actually figure out what needs fixing and if anything needs fixing. Thus the question, question, question.


-Michelle

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Yes. That is what I was trying very inarticulately to say.

I are a writer. I write stories gooder now.

I'm fine for awhile. I even get some great work in on various stories and then post them for review. Then some of the reviews are so harsh that I feel like I must really suck.

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BUT...for me at least, I don't crit unless I see a basic thing I like about the story - something that makes me want to help the writer get it to shine. Something that just gets me interested, which is a hell of a good start. Yes? So the fact you're getting crits might actually be a good sign?

Alright the harsh ones can be hard to take - but tbh, the harshest crit I ever had was the one that helped me the most, in writing terms that is, not emotionally.

On Aw the people who crit you are not doing it to be nasty - they are trying to help you. Bear that in mind. Along with the fact that writing on a forum isn't the same as face to face - it's hard to see someone looking at you kindly while they say something they feel needs saying.

BTW I totally gave up for a year or more - until some random guy picked up my MS at home, read it and said why the chuff aren't you working on this? OK it's flawed, but polish this and this, oh and FFS cut that! - it could work. So I did. And it did.

I feel like giving up all the time. In fact, I have given up for about 5 weeks now. But I will get back to it.

Try querying, sending a partial and a synopsis to a publisher. Then being asked for a full only to be told "Thanks, but I wasn't taken with it". That's happened to me three times on my completed ms. I still query and I'm hacking away at two different WIPs.

The moral to all this is to keep plugging away. Write, edit, revise and then do it all over again until someone is 'Taken with it'.

Richard (rejected but still going on)

kristi26 said:

And then there's the one that says, "wow, this is awful but if your MC was a flying monkey wearing a pink leotard and shiny silver wig, then you'd have something!"

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This tells me you have a flair for humor, Kristi. It's worth hanging in there at the very least to try to develop that, because God knows this world needs all the grins it can get.

I'll bet if you keep writing, things'll turn around for you.

Whenever you feel like giving up, set aside your bigger project and pump out something tiny, that you can easily fix up. Impress yourself.

I feel like giving up all the time. But I know that if I did, I would never forgive myself because writing is what I've promised myself I will keep doing, no matter how hard it gets.

IdiotsRUs said:

BUT...for me at least, I don't crit unless I see a basic thing I like about the story - something that makes me want to help the writer get it to shine. Something that just gets me interested, which is a hell of a good start. Yes? So the fact you're getting crits might actually be a good sign?

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Agree with this. I sometimes go to zoetrope.com to get feedback on first or second drafts and in order to get my stuff critiqued I have to review five other stories. 95 per cent of those I just skip on past.

If you haven't lost your reader / critic by paragraph two (or let's be honest here, paragraph 1 oftentimes) you are already in that 5 per cent I reckon.

My only advice for you is the advice I give to my daughter all the time: It's not talent that's the most important factor for success, it's perseverance.

If your writing is only so-so, it can absolutely get better...unless you quit.

kristi26 said:

Sometimes I feel like giving up, like I'm not good enough at this to get anywhere. Anyone else like that?

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Never. I'm way too dense.

I just got a koosh letter (the sound of a toilet flushing) from someone who read my partial. Feel lower than a ditch digger's ass.

I hate to say it, but there's an ingredient here that we don't always want to think about: time. No amount of criticism would have saved the stories that I wrote when I was very young, because I was writing from a place of emotional immaturity. No amount of criticism would have saved the stories that I wrote when I was middling-young, because I still needed time to ripen, both as a person and as a writer.

I would get criticism, and I could try to apply it at a superficial level, but I wouldn't understand the deeper level where it was coming from, so I could only make superficial changes.

Mind you, I'm 26 now, so I don't think you have to wait till you're ancient to write great stuff, or anything. And I don't think it's a matter of age (although I think that age helps; there are piano prodigies, but not novelist prodigies, and no, I'm not going to count Christopher Paolini.) It's just a matter of reading A LOT, and writing A LOT, and trusting that your time will come if you come every day and put in the practice you need to put in.

kristi26 said:

Sometimes I feel like giving up, like I'm not good enough at this to get anywhere. Anyone else like that?

I'm fine for awhile. I even get some great work in on various stories and then post them for review. Then some of the reviews are so harsh that I feel like I must really suck.

I read about some AWers complaining that they get partial requests from agents only to have them turned down. My word, I'd love to get even a partial request. I've never been asked for more. Most of the time, I don't even get an answer.

I love writing. I really do. But I'm starting to wonder, am I that person on American Idol that thinks they rock at singing but really is very bad at it? Am I a terrible writer?

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Hi Kristi,

First- sorry you're feeling down. But harsh reviews do not at all mean you suck. Some years ago- my uncle looked at a piece I wrote. (uncle is professional writer). I'd already been writing for years- but until that point it was mostly about the "story".

Well, he RIPPED it apart. (in a nice but very honest way). In those ten minutes, I learned more about the "craft" of writing than I had in my entire life. I'd always gotten compliments on my writing. But now my uncle knew I wanted to be a professional. I had to enter a whole new ballgame.

Critiques from fellow writers will probably always be more critical than non-writers. We notice things that non-writers don't. I'm sure it's that way in every field.

From your post- I gather you don't really want to give up. You said yourself that you love writing. Right now, you're just feeling down. Chin up! The great thing about writing is it's a life long learning process.

Are you writing steadily? Reading a lot? If so- you're probably improving more than you realize. Sometimes it can be very difficult to be objective of one's own work.