This piece, by David B. Coe, originally appeared on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists site on 4/23/09.
I’m in the midst of rewrites. I received a revision letter from my editor the other day and have been wading through his comments, trying to bring fresh thinking to a novel that I finished six months ago, the last book in a series that I was glad to finish.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the series very much, and I think that the three books taken together represent my best work to date. But this trilogy followed a five book series set in the same world, and I. Am. Ready. To. Move. On.
And in fact I have moved on. I’ve completed the first book in a new project that I love. My mind is there, in that new world. My head is filled with the stories of a whole new cast of characters. Wrenching myself out of that world and back into this one is no small feat.
I find myself wishing that just this once my editor had said in his revision letter, “David, this is perfect. Don’t change a word.”
Okay, I’m back now. For a while there I was laughing too hard to type….
I’ve described the revision process in a more methodical way elsewhere and I won’t bother going over it again here. But I will say that, for me, it may be the most emotionally draining part of writing a novel and preparing it for publication. I don’t mean this as a complaint. Truly I don’t. But going through my own 140,000 word manuscript reading comment after comment about all the things I did wrong isn’t easy.
This manuscript is actually pretty clean; few problems over all. Still, there must be 300 comments in there, ranging from subtle changes in wording, to corrections of silly mistakes, to more substantial comments relating to character and plotting. And though I love my editor, and though I’ve been through this many times before and have developed a fairly thick skin, I have to admit that some of my editor’s remarks raise my hackles.
Read the rest of the article on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists site.
This piece, by Marty Halpern, originally appeared on his More Red Ink blog on 4/24/09.
Are book reviews (and by default, book reviewers) so sacrosanct as to be above reproach?
Authors — and yes, editors and publishers as well — are taught at a very young age in their professional careers to ignore reviews, to not take them personally, to turn the other cheek, so to speak. And why is that? Why can’t we respond to reviews?
Because we will give the impression that we are unprofessional, that we are whiners. At least that’s what our peers — and possibly readers of the review — may think. But from our own perspective, we also have to worry that we’ll piss off the reviewer by our response, and then that reviewer will take it out on us a hundredfold in the next review, if in fact there even is a next review. And then others may not want to review our work for fear of receiving such a response as well. And as Cheryl Morgan (a book reviewer and critic) just pointed out to me: "…if an author challenges a review, his fans will go after the reviewer, whether he wants them to or not."
Reviews/reviewers and authors are sort of like the separation between Church and State. Yet the incoming president takes the oath of office with his hand upon a Bible; and the coin of the realm all proclaim "In God We Trust."
So where does that leave us?
Some authors I know truly don’t care about reviews, reviewers, or what others think of their stories. Once they’ve completed a work of fiction and it’s been accepted by the editor, they then move on to the next project and never look back. While other authors are deeply concerned — and affected — by reviews and what others think of their fiction.
I worked with an author on her short fiction collection, and after the book was published we stayed in contact with one another for a bit. The following year her next novel was published, and it was reviewed in Locus magazine — a mediocre review at best, but at least it wasn’t blatantly negative. (Locus, though, doesn’t typically publish blatantly negative reviews; I assume if the book is that bad, they simply choose not to review it, so a mediocre review in Locus, when all is said and done, is definitely not a good review.)
What upset the author the most, however, was that the reviewer missed a key element of the story — and that key element would have explained the reviewer’s primary issue with the novel (and maybe then the review wouldn’t have been mediocre). Locus, at the time, was considered a highly influential publication (though not so much anymore, now that we are solidly in the digital age, and readers, book buyers, and book collectors get the majority of their information and reviews online), so even a mediocre review could have a strong, negative sales effect on a book. But we’ll never know, will we: missed opportunities — aka sales — cannot be measured.
But the question(s) remains: Did the reviewer blow it big time by missing that key element of the story? Or, did the author — and, let’s be honest, the book’s editor shares responsibility in this as well — blow it big time by not communicating that key element more effectively to the reader/reviewer? If every review of the novel contained this same "omission," then yes, we could agree that the fault lies with the author, and the author’s editor.
But if only one review were guilty of this oversight, then the finger would indeed point to the reviewer. If the review was on Joe’s Friendly Neighborhood blog, then I don’t think the author (and editor and publisher) would be particularly concerned; but when that mediocre review shows up in the Washington Post Book World or Publishers Weekly (before Reed Business Information tried to sell the publication, and, to reduce costs, began paying freelance reviewers $25.00 per review; read more about PW’s freelance fees), then we know sales will most likely be affected.
Unfortunately, given the Church and State dichotomy, the author has no recourse but to grin and bear it — or to hit his [the generic use of "his," implying both male and female authors] head against the wall and scream, if he tends to not be the silent type.
And yet, I’m encountering more and more reviews of late where the reviewer just doesn’t seem to get it! Why is that? [Notice I keep asking this same question a lot.] Is it the reviewer’s lack of experience and knowledge in the genre? It’s difficult to say, unless one knows the reviewer personally, or the reviewer provides a professional bio alongside the review. And all of this places even more pressure on the author who cares about what others say of his work.
Here’s my take on the three main issues with genre reviews; they are like the plague, and they are spreading…
Read the rest of the article on Marty Halpern’s More Red Ink blog.
I had a nice interview today on Cowgirl Life radio. It was fun.
Blog talk radio is a great networking too.
Numenon, by Sandy Nathan, is a Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner!
By winning a Nautilus Silver Award with her book, Numenon, author Sandy Nathan joins the ranks of Deepak Chopra, M.D., Barbara Kingsolver, Thich Nnat Hanh, Jean Houston, PhD., Eckhart Tolle, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. All are Nautilus Award winners. “Joining the company of these amazing people moves me to tears,” says Sandy.
As a Silver Award Winner, Numenon will pass to the highest level of judging for the Nautilus Awards, the Gold Award level. If Numenon wins at this level, it will be featured at the Book Expo America and win many other honors.
“As wonderful as it would be to win the Gold Award, what thrills me is what the Nautilus Awards are about,” says Sandy. “My writing and life are directed toward making this planet a better place. I feel like I’ve found a spiritual home with the Nautilus contest and the people behind it.”
The Nautilus Award was established to find and reward distinguished literary contributions to spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social change as well as to the worlds of art, creativity and inspirational reading for children, teens and young adults.
The Nautilus Awards are dedicated to “changing the world one book at a time.” Books are judged in a three-tier system using a carefully prepared list of notable characteristics. The judging process is laborious and long, carried out by three teams of highly qualified reviewers. They have successful careers in the book industry as well as the vision to pick out books that offer new options for a better world. Each book is evaluated by at least two judges. Silver winners are selected from each category by the readers in Team #2, and these winning titles are then passed along to the third team where the Gold winners are chosen. Two judges must agree on each Silver winner – and consensus is required for the Gold Winners.
Sandy Nathan, "one happy author!"
“This blog is one way that I connect with my fellow writers and authors, as well as my readers,” says Sandy Nathan. “I have a request. I would appreciate your prayers, blessings, good wishes, positive thoughts, or whatever fits your personal beliefs for Numenon as it winds its way through the Nautilus judging process and the judging of the other contests in which it’s entered. It’s entered in four or five more. I believe in the power of prayer, and I always pray reciprocate. Actually, I just pray for everyone all the time. If you could cast a positive vibe in Numenon’s direction, I’d be very grateful.”
This post, by John Dougherty, originally appeared on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure on 4/1/09.
We had a science teacher at our secondary school who, on this date every year, would send some hapless first year to one of his colleagues with a request for a long stand. Or, occasionally, a big weight.
Even then, I always thought the ‘long stand’ was the better gag (not much better, but that was about as sophisticated as humour got at our school). After all, you wouldn’t normally talk about ‘a big wait’; it would be a long wait, wouldn’t it? But of course if he’d requested a long wait, a child who’d been warned about the ‘long stand’ prank might make the connection.
I’ve been thinking lately about how it’s on this sort of care with words, and this sort of awareness of the meanings of words, that good writing often rests. Probably it’s particularly on my mind at the moment because I’ve been going through the proofs for my next book, Jack Slater and the Whisper of Doom, and one of the things to be aware of – at this stage at least as much as any other – is that sometimes a phrase which carries your meaning perfectly adequately can also carry another meaning.
It’s not enough to think, "Does this say what I want it to?" – there should also be a small part of the writer’s brain asking, "Does this say anything I don’t want it to?"
My son was recently reading a book in which a character – in a environment very familiar to him – is looking for somewhere to hide. There are a lot of short, sharp sentences to emphasise the urgency of the situation – "His enemy was getting closer. He looked round," that sort of thing – and then comes the sentence, "A great oak tree grew in the corner of the field."
Reading on, it’s fairly clear that the writer means that there was a great oak tree in the corner of the field that had been growing there for some years and which was still alive and therefore growing; but when I read the sentence, it caused me to stumble internally, because for a moment I wondered if the writer might mean that as the character watched, a tree began to grow and in a matter of seconds was very large.
Some of you may think I’m just being pedantic – and you wouldn’t be the first – but to my mind, pedantry’s a much underrated pastime; and in my defence, there were a number of factors that made this a not entirely unreasonable supposition:
Read the rest of the post on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.
This piece, the first in a three-part series by Amy Rogers, originally appeared on the Publishing Renaissance site—an excellent resource for indie authors and small imprints—on 4/21/09.
or How I Learned to Stop Grousing and Make Something Happen in My Own Backyard – Part 1 of 3
If you’re a writer, you probably spend a fair amount of time complaining how hard it is to get published. (It’s in our job description, right?)
So over the years, conversations in my lunch-bunch of writer friends eventually progressed from whining to full-on fantasizing. “Someone should start a really cool indie publishing house,” somebody said.
“Yeah, we’d publish all the good stuff that New York ignores because we live in the South and we’re not hip or famous,” someone else added.
“Yeah!” everyone agreed.
“But we’re writers. We don’t have any, you know, money.”
This conversation repeated itself many times, starting back in 1999, when I was part of a small-but-feisty band of writers who set out to empower and raise the profile of our literary community in Charlotte, N.C., despite our lack of resources, benefactors or any expertise whatsoever.
Three of us researched small presses around the country, networked like crazy (difficult for us introverted writers, so we told ourselves it was investigative journalism), and scribbled on yellow legal pads in an attempt to come up with something that might one day resemble a business plan. It was hard to get our minds around such a large, complex and changing industry. But we worked at it for a year while doing our freelance jobs.
One day everything fell into place when we realized that most traditional trade publishing entities (non-self-publishing) can fit into one of just a few categories.
1. Mainstream Commercial Publishing: Think Random House, HarperCollins, all the giant power players with global influence and products. Through acquisitions and mergers, many of the former household names have been consolidated in recent years. Big ambitions, big sellers, big dollars at stake.
2. University Presses: These books are often ambitious and expensive but must be viable commercially; they also fulfill the institution’s educational mission. Example: the University of Chicago publishes books about art and architecture.
3. Specialty Presses: Targeted products for specific audiences (can be religious, how-to, business-related, journals, etc.).
4. Indie Presses: Visionaries or devoted lovers of literature who often put their own money into the company and rarely garner fame or fortune. Widely seen as doing “God’s work” since they publish the books large companies won’t touch: poetry, untested writers, regional and non-mainstream works.
Suddenly, publishing started to make sense. Almost everything from international bestsellers to local, grassroots books could be pegged somewhere in this model. We could really see the proverbial forest – and the trees. It was exhilarating. And it allowed us to focus.
We knew right away we could never attempt to become a large, mainstream publisher. We weren’t academics, so that was out. And we couldn’t open a specialty press because we didn’t have a specialty.
Cha-ching! We were indies! Yes! We’d be like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his beat-poet friends who founded City Lights Publishers and their legendary bookstore in San Francisco, back in the ’50s.
We’d discover and nurture new literary talent in our own region, we’d launch emerging writers, and we’d put our city on the national literary map.
But there was still one problem, and it was a big one. We had absolutely no resources and we had no idea how to find them – if they even existed.
Read the part two, and follow the link to part three, on the Publishing Renaissance site, where you can find many more articles and resources of interest to indie authors and small imprints.
Amy Rogers is the author of Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas. She is a founder and the Publisher of the award-winning Novello Festival Press. NFP is the nation’s only library-sponsored literary publisher, part of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C.
This article was originally posted at Alan’s blog – The Word.
Rejection is an inevitable part of the writing life. If you’re not good with rejection, you should never even entertain the idea of being a writer. It never ceases to amaze me just how belligerent some people get about rejections. And often, the most vocal are usually the worst writers, refusing to learn from critiques and improve their craft.
No matter how good you think you might be as a writer, you can always improve. My many years learning and teaching martial arts has taught me that there’s never an end to learning any kind of art. Writing, painting, dancing, Kung Fu – no matter how good you are, you can always get better.
And no matter how good you are, you will always get rejections. I’m sure that even Errol Flynn didn’t bed every woman he pursued.
So rejection is a part of the writing life and you need to get used to that. I remember an old Peanuts cartoon, where Snoopy is cold and depressed so Woodstock cheers him up by making a blanket out of Snoopy’s rejection slips. You can’t do that any more, as rejections are usually via email (even if submissions aren’t), but the underlying principle still applies. When you get served lemons, make lemonade. When you get rejections, learn.
Often a rejection will simply say, "Thanks but no thanks." But you will occasionally get a few words giving some kind of reason for the rejection. On rare occasions you’ll get a more detailed critique. I’ve found that the more my writing improves, the better class of rejection I receive. That’s moving in a good direction, right? I’ll often get a rejection saying something along the lines of, "This was so close to being accepted, but we decided against it because…" Frustrating as it is, rejections like that are worth their weight in gold. (Well, they’re worth more than that – the weight of an email in gold does not a rich man make, but you get the idea.)
Never, ever just write rejections like that off. Don’t be a princess and harrumph and say, "Well, they just don’t get it. They don’t recognise my genius." Most likely they recognise a lot more about you than you recognise about yourself. Pay attention to the points they raise, think really hard about any advice they give, try to apply that advice to a new draft of the story. It will make it better, every time.
In my experience, the most painful rejections are the rejections from shortlists. You’ve submitted your work, you’re really pleased with the story, and you sit back to wait. After a few weeks or months, depending on the publication, you get a letter back. It says something like, "We really like this piece and would like to hold onto it for another (x) weeks to see if we can fit it into our publication/anthology/whatever."
This is great news – if it goes no further than this, remember to be pleased that you got shortlisted. But it really does burn when you get another letter several weeks later saying, "Sorry, we’ve decided against it." It burns because you know it was good enough to be bought and published, you know they seriously considered it, but in the end something else they received was better. So short of getting a balaclava and a weapon and hunting down all the authors that are better than you, you have to suck it up and move on. Something about that shortlisted story worked, so your writing is going in the right direction. Fan the flames of that near success and keep plugging on and on.
You will get far more rejections than you ever get acceptances, unless you become as famous as Neil Gaiman. He can write anything and it gets bought. In the meantime, you just have to keep playing the game.
I’ve just yesterday had one of those shortlist rejections, which is what prompted me to write this post. It was for an anthology and I thought I was in, but got rejected in the last round. And yeah, it burns. But at least I know that story is a good one. A little more polish and it’ll go out again to other places and we’ll see if someone else will buy it. I have another story that is currently sitting on a shortlist. Fingers crossed that I might be luckier with that one. I also have two or three other short stories out there with other publications that I’m waiting to hear back on.
Four or five stories in circulation and the odds are that I’ll get four or five rejections. But you have to stay in it. I’ve sold work before and I’ll sell work again. Hopefully I’ll eventually improve my skills to the point where I can sell more and get rejected less. Either way, it’s something I’m compelled to do and I love writing. You have to. No one in their right mind would put themselves through this grinder on a regular basis unless they loved what they did.
"Be not afriad of moving slowly. Fear only standing still." – Old Chinese proverb.
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Alan is an indie author and publisher with two dark fantasy novels in print – RealmShift and MageSign. You can learn all about him at his website.
This piece, by P. Bradley Robb, originally appeared on the Fiction Matters site on 3/23/09.
“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s first rule of writing addresses what I like to call the Golden Assumption – “If you write it, they will read.”
Yes, writing a book is an incredibly time consuming task. Days often skip weeks and fly straight into months, piling up with abandon before the first draft is even done. After spending so long writing a novel, as a writer it can be very easy to feel entitled. After all, you worked so hard, it’s easy to feel that at least some people should repay you that time by reading your work.
However, reading is itself an investment. When a reader picks up a book, they are asking to be entertained for the better part of ten hours. In the age when laws are being passed to stop people from multitasking while driving, ten hours of undivided attention is no small sum.
Thus, according to Mr. Vonnegut, we owe it to our readers to not make light of that investment. How? Write a book that offers the reader a reward for reading. Not a monetary reward, mind you, but rather a story that is and of itself rewarding.
For some, this means not pulling out a punch out ending ala St. Elsewhere. For others it means nixing a favorite scene because it just doesn’t work, or cutting out a favorite character, or even changing the narrative point of view. For me? It means I am going through a rather extensive pre-writing process before I get too involved in my book.
How about you, how do you ensure that you’re making the most of your reader’s time?
Go to this post on Fiction Matters and scroll down to related posts to read analyses of Vonnegut’s Rules #2, #3 and #4. .
This article, by Hirsh Sawhney, originally appeared on The Guardian UK Books Blog on 3/11/09.
While the majors are in terrified thrall to the bottom line, the shoestring passions of the small presses will carry on regardless
It’s not a good time for New York’s books world, or so they tell me. I’ve just returned to this legendary literary capital to earn a living as a hack, and the tales of publishing pessimism are already suffocating me.
Book sales are flagging, to put it mildly; some predict 2009 will be the worst year the industry has seen in decades. As a result, senior editors are being axed, and others have been told to stop acquiring new books and having Martini lunches on the company tab.
More serious still, the books sections of several major newspapers have shut down; reduced coverage of books will likely translate into even fewer sales. Publishers, they say, will have no choice but to sink their resources into safer investments – we should probably look forward to a rash of ghost-written celebrity novels. According to some, the only thing left to read in a few years will be raunchy, simplistic e-books.
Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent publishing. Yes, independents – the ones who struggle to sell enough books to make payroll – will ensure that engaging, challenging books continue to be produced and consumed. It’s they who’ll safeguard literature through the dark economic days ahead.
I’m biased, of course. My own book – yes, here comes some shameless self-promotion – is being published by one of New York’s most exciting small publishers, Akashic. After working closely with this boutique house for more than two years – and hearing rumblings from friends and colleagues who work with bigger houses – I’m convinced that the services small and mid-sized independent publishers provide are truly unique.
First of all, there’s the personal care that a writer receives from an indie house. I send an email with an idea or a doubt; two minutes later, my very busy publisher writes me back. I have an issue with some changes to my manuscript or concerns about a foreign licensing deal; we discuss it over orange juice on a Sunday morning.
But this touchy-feeliness is just the icing on the cake. The real virtue of working with an independent publisher is the artistic experimentation they not only allow, but encourage. Akashic’s proclivity for edginess and iconoclasm was apparent every step of the way while I was editing Delhi Noir, an anthology of urban Indian fiction for them, and this tendency is apparent in most of the titles they put out.
Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK Books Blog.
My name is Bobby Ozuna, author of the literary fiction novel: PROUD SOULS, public speaker, ghost-writer and host of a new Internet Radio (Talk) Show called "The Soul of Humanity" My show was designed to offer a platform for independent artists–from musicians to authors–and promote their efforts to create success within their passions. I have also begun featuring industry experts, such as a lecture agent, a marketing agent (coming soon) and industry leaders pertinent to the world of indie arts.
"The Soul of Humanity" streams LIVE every Wednesday night @ 7PM CST via the Artist First (World) Radio Network and reaches a world wide listening audience of over 7,000 listeners with an archive feature, so your fans and followers can catch re-broadcasts of your show at any time and any date.
To help indie artists who are not ready for an interview, I offer a "plug" feature where for a simple $10 USD contribution via PayPal, you can have your book or CD title, your name and a brief description of your product plugged LIVE to my listening audience at $10 per show/week.
If you are interested in sponsoring the show or being a guest, or simply having your work plugged LIVE to my world-wide listening audience, please contact me here: bobby@ozunapub.com.
…supporting the independent arts…
~Bobby Ozuna | www.OzunaPub.com | "Drawing Stories…With Words"
My name is Bobby Ozuna, author of the literary fiction novel: PROUD SOULS, public speaker, ghost-writer and host of a new Internet Radio (Talk) Show called "The Soul of Humanity" My show was designed to offer a platform for independent artists–from musicians to authors–and promote their efforts to create success within their passions. I have also begun featuring industry experts, such as a lecture agent, a marketing agent (coming soon) and industry leaders pertinent to the world of indie arts.
"The Soul of Humanity" streams LIVE every Wednesday night @ 7PM CST via the Artist First (World) Radio Network and reaches a world wide listening audience of over 7,000 listeners with an archive feature, so your fans and followers can catch re-broadcasts of your show at any time and any date.
To help indie artists who are not ready for an interview, I offer a "plug" feature where for a simple $10 USD contribution via PayPal, you can have your book or CD title, your name and a brief description of your product plugged LIVE to my listening audience at $10 per show/week.
If you are interested in sponsoring the show or being a guest, or simply having your work plugged LIVE to my world-wide listening audience, please contact me here: bobby@ozunapub.com.
…supporting the independent arts…
~Bobby Ozuna | www.OzunaPub.com | "Drawing Stories…With Words"
In this article from psychologist Carolyn Kaufman, which originally appeared on her Archetype Writing site, Dr. Kaufman explains the psychological underpinnings of the Inner Critic. In part two, she provides some practical advice for dealing with the Inner Critic in a positive way.
All of us have an inner Critic; unfortunately, its voice tends to be particularly strident when we sit down to write. “You’re no good at this,” it says. “Your ideas are stupid. Why would anyone want to read what you wrote anyhow?” Or maybe it waits until you’re actually pounding away at the keys. “That’s not the right word,” it announces. "You’re doing a terrible job of getting what’s in your head on the page. How can you call yourself a writer?”
The inner Critic doesn’t just torture writers; it’s also responsible for clinical depression and anxiety. (It’s no coincidence that mood disorders are more common in writers than the general population.) But psychotherapists know just how to deal with the inner Critic; in fact, even the most vicious Critic will fall before cognitive-behavioral techniques when they’re wielded by someone truly determined to be the victor.
We’re going to look at the psychology of the critic in this article; in part 2, we’ll get out the heavy-duty CBT (cognitive behavioral techniques). Warn your Critic now, it hasn’t got much time left!
Where That Voice Comes From: A Psychodynamic Perspective
Sigmund Freud proposed that the personality or psyche has three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. While the id is often compared to the devil that sits on one shoulder and the superego to the angel on the other, the superego is really the one responsible for the Critic’s hurtful and demeaning remarks. In other words, your Critic masquerades as a helpful little angel that just wants the best for you.
So how did we all get tricked into believing that halo is real?
When you were born, you didn’t have a superego yet. You hadn’t learned any rules and you didn’t worry that you were going to do something wrong. You were all id–when you wanted something, you wanted it immediately without regard to societal rules or pleasantries. That didn’t make you wicked, it just meant you were focused on your own needs.
In older children and adults, the residual id is the part that secretly hopes the other person will choose the smaller piece of pie, the part that urges you to skip work (or school) and sleep in, the part that would rather pursue a hobby than pay the bills or visit the in-laws. Because the id has no sense of morality, our id-like behavior is never meant to harm others; in fact, the id is important because it reminds us to take care of our own needs and desires.
How We Develop Guilt
As we form the strongest, most crucial bond with our caregivers, called attachment, we begin to introject, or incorporate, those caregivers’ values.
Our desire to please the people we love and who love us causes us to develop the conscience, which is responsible for holding information on what’s “bad” and what has been punished, and the ego ideal, which holds information on what’s “good” and what you “should” be doing. Together, the conscience and ego ideal form the superego. (From a psychodynamic perspective, people who fail to develop a conscience haven’t attached normally to caregivers because they were mistreated or neglected. When we don’t love and feel loved, there’s no reason to try to please the adults around us.)
Because the superego’s entire job is to keep us in line with society’s expectations, it’s voice is punitive, contemptuous, and loud. Some of its favorite words and phrases are “should,” “have to,” “must,” “ought to,” “can’t,” “shouldn’t,” and “mustn’t.” Every single time you think or say these words, your superego is running the show.
The Mediator’s Failings
The ego’s job is to mediate between the id and the superego, but its tools–defense mechanisms–often come up short when it comes to creative endeavors. The ego needs evidence that we’re getting it right (whatever “it” is)–and there are no “right” answers in the creative world.
Beyond Understanding
[With psychodynamic approaches] people got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change. – Albert Ellis
As you’ve probably discovered, knowing that the critic is there, and even how much it affects your work, doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to make it shut up, already.
There are two hurdles everyone who wants to make changes must face. They’re big hurdles, but there are really only two.
Read the rest of the part one, and part two, on Archetype Writing.
This piece, by Graham Storrs, originally appeared on his site on 4/10/09.
The first I heard about punk rock was in about 1975 when some kid handed me a pamphlet on the street. It was a manifesto of sorts. It had the chord diagrams for C, F and G drawn on it and, underneath, the words, “That’s all you need to know. Now go and form a rock band.”
There was some other stuff too about taking popular music back out of the hands of the elitist establishment. I was 20 at the time and already too old to get excited about wearing bin bags and big boots but the message resonated with me all the same. Music didn’t have to be handed down from above. It was time ordinary people took control of their own artistic expression.
This memory came back to me today when I read a blog post by Nicola Morgan. Now I think Nicola is great, and full of sound edvice about how to get published. As someone who wants to be published, I read Nicola’s blog – along with several other excellent blogs offering similar advice from other credible professionals and industry insiders – and I try to learn the lessons they contain. I accept completely that, if being published is your goal, you should definitely pay close attention to people like Nicola. She has certainly earned the right to give advice. Check out her website to see some of the many books she has published.
Yet what she wrote today left me feeling unsettled and uneasy. In particular, this paragraph (emphases are Nicola’s.)
And here’s the thing: all the agents and publishers who rejected me during my now well-documented and shameful 21 years of failing, were RIGHT. And I am even grateful to them. …See, I believed I was good enough a writer – which we have to believe, in order to keep going, don’t we? And yet at the same time, we also need to recognise that there’s something about what we’re doing that isn’t yet good enough. That’s the dilemma, the razor-edge we have to walk along. And all that is why I’m deeply grateful (and not even through gritted teeth) to all of them for not publishing my substandard stuff.”
What disturbs me so much about this is the way Nicola seems to have rejected her own assessment of the quality of her writing completely, in favour of the assessments made by agents and publishers. On the one hand, I can see that it is absolutely necessary to do this in order to be published (since agents and publishers are the gatekeepers.) On the other, the disturbing thing is the degree to which she seems to have internalised the industry’s judgement of what quality means.
The quibblers among you might think I’m exaggerating the case and that all Nicola is saying is, “do what publishers want and you’ll get published.” But she’s not. Look at that bit right at the centre of her paragraph, “we also need to recognise that there’s something about what we’re doing that isn’t yet good enough.” She could have said it was not yet “to their taste”, for example, but she used the words “good enough”.
Read the rest of the article on Graham Storr’s site.