A Quote for LKH

[raydyentskyez.livejournal.com]

In the words of the great (according to some) writer Steven King in his amazing memoir 'On Writing', I have found a piece of advice for LKH:

"Subjective evaluations are, as I say, a little harder to deal with (my note: than factual evaluations), but listen: if everyone who reads your book says you have a problem....you've got a problem and you better do something about it.

Plenty of writers resist this idea. They feel that revising a story according to the likes and dislikes of an audience is somehow akin to prostitution. If you really feel that way, I won't try to change your mind. You'll save on charges at Copy Cop, too, because you won't have to show anyone your story in the first place. In fact...if you really feel that way, why bother publish at all? Just finish your books and then pop them into a safe deposit box, as J.D. Salinger is reputed to have been doing in his later years."

'On Writing' by Steven King, pages 217-218

So, is this a worthwhile piece of advice or what?

Comments

[saadiira.livejournal.com]

Hell yes. And hopefully I'll soon be seeing how well it works myself, lol. Nothing wrong with a bit of whoring, if it gets you published, after all...

-Dira-

[raydyentskyez.livejournal.com]

I'm a writer, too - I've had a few bits and pieces published. But of course I got stuck with a creative writing class as a first reader and all of my comments were 'That's so good!' and 'I love it!' One of them did range out and say they didn't like dialogue, but then I remembered their stories never had one word of it.

I think if LKH decided 'Hey, I'm going to listen to some of my readers for a change' then she would sell a lot more books. And by readers I mean actual readers, not her freaky friends. I mean, Jon and Darla and etc. aren't going to tell her that her book sucks, come on!

[dwg.livejournal.com]

I absolutely hated getting all those, "it's so good!" comments, because honestly, I wanted to know what was wrong with it so I could improve. I'd rather get something scribbled all over my work and I have to actually defend a couple of things (woe about my story getting cut from the anthology last year, hooray on the poetry staying in - but hey, there's always this year for re-submission) and have to go back and change bits and pieces that never even occured to me to need attention.

Editors are totally your best friends.

LKH needs to expand her horizons beyond the freaky friends of fandom fantasy (hey, alliteration!) and get a decent editor or three to really sit down and talk to her about the problems with the books.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

It's exactly those reasons why I'm an editor in my spare time. I wind up submitting things to the projects I work on just to see what my peers think - and I know that they're not going to sit there and fangirl my work. I'll actually get back things about my spelling and sentence structure, charaterisation and all the juicy things.

I am not a writer for the glory, I'm in it for the rejection. Constructive criticism leads to improvement - I know I have problems with tenses and run-on sentences. Every now and then, I'll repeat a word in a paragraph all too often and I'm trying very hard to deal with that and maintain my narrative. It's things I now look for when I go back to edit and re-edit. I email stuff out to all my friends and while yes, it's nice to get the "It's awesome!" comments, I thrive more upon the, "Dude, you spelt toaster wrong!" stuff as it gives me something to work on.

It's better to be told by your friends that you need help rather than the publisher, because the publisher probably won't be nice, or very constructive about it at all. So if you can't handle the criticism, please, get out of writing. You're always going to have critics who don't like this, that or the other, you learn to be thick-skinned and take it, or just get the hell out.