I sent the first 97 pages of my new novel to my critique group yesterday.
Deeeeep breath. This is scary.
Really scary.
Before sending my pages to anyone – best friend, agent, editor, critique group – I always edit them one last, supposedly final time, to make sure my writing is as good as it can be. It’s kind of like straightening up the house before the cleaning lady comes. You don’t want her to know how sloppy you really are.
A couple days later, I read through the pages again. I’m aware now that Mike is reading that first paragraph, figuring out how it can have more impact with just a few simple word changes. I’m seeing that I’ve neglected Liz’s advice on hooking my reader at the end of each scene. I’m looking at the story through Jeana’s eyes, wondering if my heroine has just a touch too much of the devil in her. And I’m wondering whether Mary will catch those klunky clichés and Heather will find the humor she appreciated so much in my last book. (I so want to earn more of her smiley faces!!!)
Seeing the manuscript through their eyes, I claw my way through it again, snagging the weaknesses each reader might perceive, and finding ways to make the story even stronger than my last “best effort.â€
So if you don’t have a critique group, don’t despair. Just imagine the various types of readers you’d like to impress. Read your story through their eyes. You can do it. You’re a writer. You have a creative imagination that lets you see the world through any character you choose, so look at your words with various readers in mind – and you’ll find ways to make your narrative flow, to make your characters glow, and to improve every word, every image, and every turn of phrase.
No related posts.
It IS scary
and I don’t think it gets any easier,
especially if you try to do something different
with each novel.
The most important thing,
imho,
is getting the emotion right.
The rest will be edited and edited and edited
(my novels go through at least a dozen drafts
before being finalized)
but the emotion,
the emotion is all writer.
It is a slice of YOU.
I can so relate to that nerve-jangling experience of sending the work ‘out there’. I tend to write the kind of thing I want to read, and just hope there’s more people like me out there. If not, I’m stuffed!
I like to channel the emotional satisfaction of slowly burying my redlining CP in adverbs, misplaced modifiers, and SDTs. I find that it helps me get past the fear.
I can very much relate to this experience. Over my last holiday break I wrote a 75 000 word draft in under three weeks. Even after extensively editing it myself, handing it over to my best friend was scary. As soon as the pages left my hand I began making excuses. I know this character is a bit off, and this scene isn’t quite sitting together yet, and I want to… Amazing that my brain hadn’t come up with any of these brilliant observations until I actually gave it to her. But at the same time, reading it with her and going through scene by scene with fresh eyes was far more productive than me reading it by myself yet again.