Getting Advice for Getting Your Writing Out There

I have written a lot over the years but I would say 90 percent of it hasn’t seen the light of day. Perhaps out of self protection I always saw writing as a kind of personal hobby and a thing full of honesty about myself that I was afraid to show the rest of the world. I don’t know how many other writers will feel familiar with this beginning. The trick was to get some of my work looked at and try not to be mortified by the criticisms. In the end I picked someone whom I felt I could trust but didn’t have any connection to my other friends and someone I felt I had an upper hand on, in English anyway, A foreign friend.

 I always knew that spending hours writing words to myself was equal to just wasting time but it is hard to let go of something you have worked on and give it up to be attacked and criticized or even analysed too closely. Pressure from loved ones and friends made me finally come out of my shell. They would look at me with doubt whenever I said I was off to do some writing or they asked me what I can get up to on my own for two or three hours at a time and come back with nothing to show for it. For someone who spends as much time writing you would think I would have had something to entertain them. Practicing musicians and athletes don’t have this problem, but then they are not so shy with bum notes and stumbles either.

 I was concerned as any writer must be at times about how my work was going to be received but two things were becoming more and more obvious to me; firstly that writing in the end was for communication and there were much more efficient ways of communicating with yourself. Secondly, in order to truly develop as a writer and learn about the craft it is essential to get some work out there and receive some sort of feedback.

I sent the start of a short story I was writing called: ‘Church of God’ to my friend, (let’s call her Kun) for her advice and everything I feared came true, she criticized it and I was really hurt! This friend is not a native speaker and she didn’t really know the full story yet so of course she couldn’t fully advise me, but now I think its always good practice to get some advice about your writing. It can help you grow and learn more.

Two things in the main bothered me, one was in the written advice that she sent me and another was more personal. I will deal with the latter first and then go on to talk about the actual advice:

As, I have now found is usual she wanted to know why I wanted to write this, people always do. This ‘why’ question I think is really unfair and it bothers me. I say to myself, ‘Nobody asks Dan Brown why he wrote Da Vinci Code.’

But then I thought about it and actually they do. ’The Da Vinci Code caused a storm and was very controversial. People did actually start lookingfor answers and the author’s reputation and his past was brought up. So the fact that people want to know why tells me that I have somethingthat at least interests people enough to want to know why. This is a good thing. The difference between me and Dan Brown in this respect is, that he doesn’t have to publicly answer. He probably still gets these questions from close friends and relatives unless they are all particularly considerate. However it is still an unfair question. The story is in you, you want to bring it out, and this is art. Maybe even the artist doesn’t know why.

With regard to the actual advice she sent, a couple of things bothered me but mainly one point. I will fist quote her advice below:

1. I don’t know if the following words are right or not? I could not find  these words in the dictionary,maybe you need to check them.

gurned（Page 3 paragraph2 9th row）；

a s（Page 8 paragraph2 6th row），I think it may be “as”;

shiftin（Page 14 paragraph3 8th row）;

overwhelmed（Page 8 paragraph3 first row）;

referred（Page 16 paragraph1 second row）;

straightened（Page 17 paragraph3 second row）;

2.If you want to delete something , the  contents of the prayer maybe the best choice;

Of course this paragraph “  ‘Here let me straighten your flower before those angels get here, then we’ll go in.’…… gap between the two bones in his eye socket.” maybe can be deleted.(only in my opinion)

3. Generally speaking, peonies bloom in late April until mid-may not in the autumn; Pansies bloom in May or June, not in the autumn also;

4. In my opinion, scenery description is very important, If you give the scenery a living soul, it maybe have more connotation. Of course, you have your own ideas.

Above is my immature opinion，not critical, only my humble opinion. a good literary works needs repeated revision. your work is very fresh to me, and a good work.

The thing that bothered me most was number 3, about the flowers. I was irritated by it and it still itched like ants under my skin while I was washingthe dishes later on that day. The comment refers to the fact that I have a particular type of flower in bloom in my description at the wrong time of year. I have tried to think why it bothers me so much to have this mistake highlighted and I really can’t fully understand my strong reaction. I suppose it’s because I have said something that can be found to be incorrect when I thought I was workingfrom imagination. The fact is though havingthe right flowers at the right time of year is a very valid point and something that would be picked up if it was ever published. But it seemed to me to get in the way of my writing. I knew for some reason at the time when I wrote about flowers that I was on dodgy ground and it burned my heart to be caught out like this. I felt that this had stifled my creativity in a way, and if I want Peonies around the church in my imagination I can have them, even if it is f-ing Summer! OK?!

Of course such a reaction is not useful, I had to come up with a more useful and constructive way of thinking about this event and I think the best way is to think of this as learning more about writing. I suppose there are particular immovable facts about the real world which need to remain in place, even in art and we just have to accept them as we accept that we must spell things correctly and use punctuation, or at least have a very valid and clear reason why not.

I still don’t fully accept the point and I want to do research for myself to find out if it is at all possible for these flowers to be in bloom during summer and then I can perhaps leave them in my lovely description. Perhaps it may however have been less time consuming and irritating if I had done this research in the first place when I got that feeling I was ‘on dodgy ground’ writing about flowers or something else that I don’t have former knowledge of.

When I thought about it seriously though I felt encouraged at all of the things that could have been said but weren’t. She didn’t say it was boring or that she couldn’t understand any of it, she had merely commented on a few issues and the fact was, I had learned from them. At that point I felt like I had taken a very important step in understanding the craft. A new avenue for exploring the purpose of and indeed my personal relationship with writing had opened up to me and I felt free to walk in and lap up all the free advice that I could. The first thing I did was send other pieces to other people who had pestered me for something to read in the past, even some of them English friends and some that I know to be better writers than me.

I enjoy getting their advice now and they seem to enjoy reading my work so it is really of mutual benefit. Plus it is like having a free writing coach or teacher on hand. The trick is to distinguish between what advice is useful to your own writing style and what is not. The writing is still personal but this time it is more sure of itself and strangely seems more willing to put itself on the page when I am sitting over my notebook for hours.