5 Tips on Self-Control

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Highsong got lots of tags, so here's ya'll's reward.  For anyone still interested, you can purchase it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B004YQBT24 or here: www.smashwords.com/books/view/…


1.  If your work cannot explain or defend itself, it needs a rewrite. The knee-jerk reaction of most people I run across in writing circles is the manic desire to man the wall of their ego and defend it from all comers.  The person in question didn’t really come for critique, per se, but validation.  They only want to be told how wonderful they are, not that their character is a vomit-inducing Mary Sue described with prose the written equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Good writing needs no explanation; bad writing deserves none.  It’s as simple as that.  If someone says they didn’t understand something fundamental (who the protagonist is, what their goals are, the setting, etc.), and you find yourself explaining to them that in 50 pages it all becomes clear, there’s only one reaction: you just lost a reader.  Someone in that theoretical dream bookstore in your head just put your book back on the shelf.  I’m amazed at the number of people who argue the equivalent of “Well, I’m being stupid on purpose and you just don’t get it!”  “I meant to use passive voice; it’s a stylistic choice!”  “I’m deliberately obfuscating the reader’s ability to follow the story because my character is an assassin!” I suspect it comes from a combination of A) ignorance (the person hasn’t done enough research on how to tell a story) and B) immaturity (they think they have the right to tell the reader what they should enjoy.)  If you, or someone in your writing group, spends more than five minutes justifying why they did something, ask them if they’re going to have that disclaimer for their agent or any reader who walks past their book.  Are they going to stand in the bookstore for everyone who walks by?  Include it on the inside flap of their book?  Post it on Amazon? No?  Then why are they defending it now?  Please note that this pretty much only applies to the basic storytelling elements; if someone doesn’t get how your hard science-fiction spaceccraft works because they’re not a sci-reader or a physicist, but your sci-fi/physicist friends think it rocks, you’re probably okay.

2. If you think you suck, you do. I understand the inner critic, big time, but man, I hate it when other people share their inner critic with me.  And I don’t mean “I think your writing sucks” I mean “Oh, I’m so terrible, I’m just awful, meeeeeeee!  I suuuuuuuck!”  What are people supposed to say to that?  “Oh ... um, no you don’t.”  We came here to critique writing, not gulp the hook you set out for compliment fishing.  Maybe I’m harsh, but damn it, writing groups are not support groups.  If you want a support group, Google it and go there. Seriously.  It’s one thing to be like “Oh, man, I had a flat tire this week, funny story!” and something else entirely to say “I have clinical depression.  The razor blades call to my wrists.” I’ve said many a time that I feel that writers have to get to a certain point before they’re ready for critique, and brother, if you are teetering on some kind of emotional or mental precipice, you ain’t ready.  Especially if you’re dosing your problem with alcohol, drugs, or both.  Nothing gets my hackles up quicker than someone who brought their writing in order to really talk about the stuff they should have mentioned to their therapist that week (double points if their stuff has nothing to do with the subject matter that crit group critiques. Bringing an adult memoir to a children’s picture book crit, my ass!) Your critique group is there to help you be a better writer, not a person more sound of mind and emotional state.  That’s not our job, and in most cases, not what we signed up for.  Plus, in a critique group, there’s plenty of praise and condemnation to go around.  Everyone is here to put themselves on the line, get knocked down, and built back up again.  You don’t have the monopoly on feeling bad, be it about your life or about your work. And if you’re taking all the praise and giving none of it out, maybe you need to stay home.

3. If you think you can circumvent “the badness”, you’re wrong. This once again gets into people who want to be told they’re wonderful without wanting to do the work.  Instead of writing, rewriting, sweating, weeping tears of blood, rewriting, querying, writing synopsi, attending conferences, pitching, and rewriting, someone craps out a novel and sends it to a  self-publisher.  (Robert Stanek, I’m looking in your direction!)  Then they’re shocked when bad reviews come out.  Their souls are shattered, and they spend the rest of their days blogging about how no one understands the genius they not only never had in the first place, but never worked to obtain.  (Or in Stanek’s case, create an army of sockpuppets to delete negative reviews and post 5-star Amazon reviews and post on his own forum how great his work is. I ‘m not joking.) Here’s the long and the short: if your critique group, ideal readers, or agents don’t like your work, odds are your readers won’t either.  Notice that I didn’t include “your mom” on that list, or “your best friend”.  There’s some unwritten contractual obligation there to tell you you’re wonderful, and unless Ma has a Master’s in Creative Writing or Literature, I wouldn’t put too much stock by it.  (Ma telling you you’re good is “Hey, I think I can write today instead of eating ice cream and watching Titanic!” praise, not “This bitch is ready for the masses!” praise.)  If you can’t handle someone on the Internet telling you you suck, how are you going to handle a full-blown Hatedom?  In order to keep writing, you have to develop a callous: one that is hard enough to keep out the nay-sayers who don’t know what they’re talking about, and permeable enough so that the people who really do know what they’re talking about get through to you.  It can’t be an all or nothing deal.  Salt helps with the bitter, it really does.  Get salty.

4.  No one likes a crybaby. There’s a time and place for commiseration.  There really is  With a best friend over the phone or IM chatting.  With a spouse on the couch.  Sometimes even with a writing roup, especially when a really big rejection came down the line.  But not when you just got critiqued.  Seriously.  I’ve been snubbed, given the cold shoulder, ignored, cut out, and slandered for giving an honest opinion of someone’s work.  (My finest hour was pointing out a logical fallacy in someone’s world-building and later discovering they were a keynote speaker at an SCBWI event and a published author.)  This kind of position is a mixed blessing,because while I might have a reputation as a manuscript-eating pitbull, I rub shoulders with other pitbulls who are just as ruthless to me as I am to them, and our little pack has the highest ratio of being published or landing representation.  They are my mentors, and I’m glad to say “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” when I get knocked to the floor by a sledgehammer critique point.  I’m grateful for that.  Other people really, really aren’t. Don’t be that person.  There are plenty of terms for it: the waaaaaahmbulance, riding the fail whale, and so on.  Critique, no matter how it tears your dreams down, is not a personal attack.  It is not a summation of all your efforts to date, a ruling on your skills as hopelessly inept, an endgame, an apocalyptic judgement on your worth as a human being, or an emotional nuclear strike that will forever plunge your love of writing into nuclear winter.  It’s an opinion, and sometimes those opinions can come from pretty stupid places.  Judge the ratio of stupid to has-a-point, incorporate or reject as needed, and move on. Don’t seek out your favorite places to spread bad feelings around, and especially don’t do it at a writing group!  And if you feel the urge to blog about all your bad feelings, just think: you could
actually be writing right now.

5. Critique really is good for you. I recently watched some amateur animations on Youtube, and was quite sucked into one that involved some spectacular god-creatures fighting each other.  The animation was great, and the story was well-executed ... for about two minutes.  Then suddenly the animation stopped providing exposition, and instead text line after text line informed us that the story was not about the characters involved in the intro, but something set two hundred years in the future.  With ellipses that contained five or six periods.  (Man, I hate that!)  I was rightfully indignant that the story I’d been interested in was not the real story, and the bad voice actors just added insult to injury.  Seriously, some of the lines may as well have been “We’re in terrible danger and I have to go to the store.”    The dialogue was absurd in addition to being lackluster. All I could think was that a decent, strong premise got wrecked by a lack of critique.  That no one looked at the script or dialogue readings because they were caught up in the animation.  Storytelling in and of itself is an art, and if you have bad story, no amount of flash is going to save it.  Just ask Michael Bay.  Have you ever watched someone on DA, and realized that you’d watched them for a couple of years, and they haven’t improved at all?  That the Lion King fanart that you started watching them for is still all they draw, and they really haven’t gotten better even at that?  This is what happens when people ignore critique and/or refuse to try new things.  Critique is the fire that forges you as an artist, be it storyteller or visual.  Its painful, but it is necessary if you want to not only be better, but be the best you can be.
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Angel4Danger's avatar
Lol. if razor blades are calling to their wrists it's not depression, it's hallucination