{"id":7831,"date":"2013-03-08T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=7831"},"modified":"2013-03-08T06:00:11","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T12:00:11","slug":"ignorance-is-not-bliss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=7831","title":{"rendered":"Ignorance is NOT Bliss"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"http:\/\/raws.adc.rmit.edu.au\/~s3326816\/blog2\/?p=850\"<\/a>
I don’t want you to be in the middle of the road, I want you to be on one side or the other.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019m open to people reading my works and telling me exactly what they think. After all, I wouldn\u2019t be sharing my writing if I didn\u2019t want a reaction.<\/p>\n

When I finished my novel in December of 2011, I was tired and proud. Nervous, too, because it was the longest sustained work I\u2019d ever written. Nervous because the protagonist is female and I\u2019m not and by daring to write her the way I did I\u2019m opening myself up to criticism that I don\u2019t know how women behave.<\/p>\n

Worse, still, I was worried that I would be revealed to be a fraud as a writer, too. That my skill at turns of phrase and world-building and simple sentence construction were terrible, awful, and not deserving of anyone\u2019s time to read was perhaps my biggest fear. (Run-on, overly complicated sentences notwithstanding.)<\/p>\n

So I really, really thought hard about what I wanted from a critique of my work.<\/p>\n

Honesty, more than anything else.<\/p>\n

If my writing can\u2019t elicit any kind of reaction from a reader, I don\u2019t deserve to have my work read. It\u2019s one thing to just spew words on a page or a screen and hope for the best but once a story is written, I want you to feel something. Anything. Revulsion is fine but in general not the reaction I write for. Sadness is better. Shock. Any kind of reaction. Happiness is best.<\/p>\n

The best stories move the reader. If I can do that I\u2019m better at this than I thought.<\/p>\n

So when I get notes back from editors or first readers, that\u2019s what I\u2019m looking for.<\/p>\n

Now, that said, I will read through the comments and then put them aside for a while. I\u2019ve been infuriated at a couple of comments because it was obvious that the reader just didn\u2019t get it. As recently as a couple of years ago I would be upset with the reader who told me what I didn\u2019t want to hear. But since I\u2019ve asked for honesty, I have to admit that if the reader didn\u2019t get what I was going for it was because I didn\u2019t do my job as a storyteller.<\/p>\n

Dammit.<\/p>\n

That meant I had more work ahead of me. It meant more time in a world I thought I was already beyond. It meant I didn\u2019t know enough. It meant more revision, more re-writing, and more work.<\/p>\n

In general, the feedback I\u2019ve received has pushed me to become better, to tell the stories more clearly, to WRITE. But that dissatisfaction with my skills can overwhelm me and I will set aside a work that doesn\u2019t fire back with the reaction I hoped for.<\/p>\n

But worse, it\u2019s no reaction at all that\u2019s so discouraging.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t go all knee-jerk and fire up inflammatory responses because that\u2019s unprofessional. But what I say in the privacy of my own writing space\u2026 Well, let\u2019s just say that I\u2019ve been harder on myself than on anyone I\u2019ve asked to read my stuff.<\/p>\n

When it\u2019s said and done, critiques are difficult for me but they spur me to work harder. What I have to avoid are the shortcuts that put me in the wrong place to start with.<\/p>\n

You know, if I\u2019m being honest about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m open to people reading my works and telling me exactly what they think. After all, I wouldn\u2019t be sharing my writing if I didn\u2019t want a reaction. When I finished my novel in December of 2011, I was tired and proud. Nervous, too, because it was the longest sustained work I\u2019d ever written. Nervous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[241,517],"class_list":["post-7831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers-life","tag-critiques","tag-honesty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}