09 Jun 2008, Posted by Cat in News, 11 Comments. Tagged writing
on writing
So tell me this – why, when I have been writing fiction consistently for about seventeen years and have edited four anthologies of reasonable quality and sold a bunch of my own stories and won a few awards & etc etc etc, could I not identify the crapness of my own novel’s prose *before* sending it out to my poor long suffering beta readers? Seriously, there are awkward unnecessary words all over the place. Whole sentences can be replaced with a single word or maybe two. Why are these things invisible on my own pages, yet glaringly obvious on every other unpublished m/s I look over? huh? huh?
11 Comments
June 9, 2008 7:23 am
girliejones
You *know* why.
Authors are never good judges of their own work.
June 09 2008 08:42 am
angelaina @
Sooooo, true, Girlie!
June 9, 2008 7:26 am
karenmiller
Heh heh heh. Welcome to my world!!!! *g*
It’s having distance and perspective. Or not, in the case of your own work. When you read a submission you have zero emotional connection or investment in it. You are coming to the work as a complete virgin. Not so your own work, which you edit and interpret and tizzy up even as you’re reading it. This is why the intervention of good beta readers is of paramount importance, I think — provided they’re readers who’ll give you the feedback you need, not what you want.
Once you get more familiar with your own work in the long form you’ll start to pick up your habits and tics, and be able to eliminate them yourself in the drafting process. It’s much easier to write tight in short fiction than it is in a novel. Keeping track of what you’ve said when the work’s as long as a single chapter is easy. Keeping track of what you said 25 chapters ago is a bit more of a challenge!
June 09 2008 07:48 am
Cat @
provided they're readers who'll give you the feedback you need, not what you want.
believe me, these folks didn't tell me much I wanted to hear...
June 9, 2008 8:41 am
angelaina
AND we all said the work was well and truly within yelling distance of salvation, babe!
We can’t see our own problems coz we have the story in our head (in some cases, heads), we KNOW what’s going on but getting that transition to paper is really, really hard. And drafts are the places where we are allowed to fail…and get drunk…then pick ourselves up again. xxxxx
June 9, 2008 9:07 am
martinlivings
Manuscripts are like kids. We see the flaws in everyone else’s, but love our own and accept them as they are, perceiving them as faultless.
Or maybe they’re like farts. I dunno.
June 09 2008 09:27 am
Cat @
Martin, you're a true poet
June 9, 2008 11:17 am
austspecfic
When you find the answer to this great mystery please share. I often find the old ‘he would try to make sure’ and the realise ‘ensure’ just about cuts it…then I probably don’t need ‘ensure’ anyway. Lol…
June 10, 2008 5:33 am
stevecav
Your rejected slush authors are waiting for their apology. Or the second stone
June 10 2008 05:36 am
Cat @
its been a long time since I rejected anyone... These days all the rejection is MINE!
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