You've searched long and hard for the right set of words to open your novel. After intense mental debate you conclude that your line "It was a dark and stormy night..." just screams PERFECT!
Days go by and you add line after line, word after word, metaphor after metaphor...
Things are moving along, then suddenly you read bit of advice in a seminar handout regarding dynamic-novel-writing. It lists the most common amateur writing mistakes and sure enough you find that your opening line "it was a dark and stormy night," was a HUGE mistake! OH NO! Then you find out, as you read the other common amateur moves, that you've been doing it all wrong.
You have a HUGE choice here. You can either scrap your manuscript, turn tail and head for the mountains in shame, or you can suck up your pride, learn from your mistakes, take the advice and make the appropriate changes.
Sometimes as writers, we are faced with opportunities to grow. Often it can make us second guess our viability as a writer, but it doesn't have to be like that. Each of us will make amateur mistakes, the question is, what will YOU do when you are shown one.
Days go by and you add line after line, word after word, metaphor after metaphor...
Things are moving along, then suddenly you read bit of advice in a seminar handout regarding dynamic-novel-writing. It lists the most common amateur writing mistakes and sure enough you find that your opening line "it was a dark and stormy night," was a HUGE mistake! OH NO! Then you find out, as you read the other common amateur moves, that you've been doing it all wrong.
You have a HUGE choice here. You can either scrap your manuscript, turn tail and head for the mountains in shame, or you can suck up your pride, learn from your mistakes, take the advice and make the appropriate changes.
Sometimes as writers, we are faced with opportunities to grow. Often it can make us second guess our viability as a writer, but it doesn't have to be like that. Each of us will make amateur mistakes, the question is, what will YOU do when you are shown one.
6 comments:
Dude! I read the same post today. Except I came across it through a series of links. Starting with the blood read pencil, then clicking away boom i read the same thing.
Hinky.
What will I do when someone, I won't mention any names, DIANA, points out an amateur mistakes? I laugh my butt off and conk myself in the head for being so lame and all amateurish.
like the horrendous grammar error in my comment. "mistake" should not be plural and I forgot "and" before my boom. Ugh.
NOTE TO SELF: Review before sending out.
LOL... you crack me up.
I hear ya though.
As much as I used to think I don't wanna come back and edit-I have found that (for me) I love it. It just took a little while to get at peace with it and now I wouldn't dream of not editing and improving a manuscript continually.
It's difficult to spot one's own mistakes in utero, in part b/c we tend to look at everything through our microscope and not someone's else's. Time heals all wounds, and some cliches :)
I'm a "suck it up" kind of gal. I like critiques. As awesome as I sometimes think my own writing is, I need that another's perspective.
Especially now that I've read that first novel so many dang times trying to edit it myself I don't even see what the actual words are; I see what the sentiment behind them are. I get it; but maybe nobody else will.
Editing and revising is not the worst thing that can happen to a novel.
........dhole
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