Day: October 12, 2006

Accepting Criticism

By / October 12, 2006 / 4 Comments

Becoming a writer is the process of acquiring skills. Many of these skills are directly related to writing. Skill in grammar, spelling, scene structure, descriptive language, characterization, and plot structure are all obvious necessities of the craft of writing. A less obvious skill is being able to receive criticism and use it wisely. I am still growing as a writer and I will be unable to grow in necessary ways unless I am able to accept criticism and glean useful information from it. Criticism can be painful, so I’ve developed a set of guidelines for myself to help me use criticism constructively.

Critics will see problems with my story that I do not see. I know what I meant to say, but a critic will only see what I actually said. I need to listen when my critic is confused or frustrated by what I wrote.

Criticism must come from two or more sources before I accept it as valid. If a criticism is made that I agree with, then I have my two sources and a change needs to be made. If I disagree with a criticism, I hold onto it to see if any of my other critics comment on the same thing.

If I have two critics with the same complaint, I compare the two critics. If they are both male computer tech guys who write high fantasy, then I can probably count those as a single complaint. However if the same complaint comes from a computer tech fantasy guy and a stay at home mom non-writer, then I should pay close attention to the complaint and change something even if I like it the way it is.

I need to have a waiting period between receiving a critique and responding to it. I should always thank the critics for the time they spent, whether or not I agree with the opinions or make any of the changes they suggest.

An insightful critic is a gem, and should be treasured as such.

Another factor which I use to decide whether to make the changes a critic suggests, is a comparison between the critic and my intended audience. If I am writing for children and the critic complains that the work is too simplistic/childish, that may actually be good news.

De-looming

By / October 12, 2006 / 8 Comments

I’ve been pretty stressed this past week. I’ve had lots of important tasks looming over me. Most tasks are just things to be done. Tasks don’t start to loom until they should already have been done. The added layer of guilt/anxiety causes a normal task to loom. Once a task is looming, I start being afraid of it because it is so big. This week I had multiple sets of tasks all looming and I couldn’t think clearly enough to clear any of it away. Another side effect of having looming tasks is that in an effort to pretend that the looming tasks weren’t there, I would focus my stressful feelings on something else. The looming stress of not-quite-finished storefront had me cleaning out my file cabinet and fretting over the fact that the storage room is a mess. The file cabinet and storage room both need to be done, but the level of stress I was expending on them was out of proportion.

Yesterday I took the evening off. I hauled raisinfish over to my house and completely ignored every single thing on my to do list. We made cookies and talked. Giving myself the space to goof off got me out from under all those looming tasks. Once I was out from under them I could see the strings that held them over my head. Little strings that I only had to snip and then the looming task would be gone. For example: There were a last few fixes left to do on the store, but I had poked around my administrative site for hours and been unable to figure out how to do them. This meant that I had to place a call to Volusion customer support. One phone call would remove a whole cloud of loom from over my head and yet I kept avoiding that phone call rather than getting it done. It turns out that at least 5 of my looming things could be solved with simple phone calls.

I started today on the phone. Snip snip snip. I cut those looming tasks down and they aren’t hanging over me anymore. The last “prepare for preorders” task that I have left to do is figuring out how to export information from my store into my quickbooks file. That task was looming, but one of those phone calls helped me see how I need to proceed. Now it is reduced to a set of smaller tasks that I can tackle singly. I can see how to do it. No more loom. Managing the quickbooks export is big on the list of things to do tomorrow morning. After this morning’s loom clearing, I deserve some afternoon time off for good behavior.