Hello Anon! Thanks for stopping by and bear with me: I get flustered when people ask for my advice! Still, I’ll do my best to help.
So, as to your question, the answer is not exactly. My biggest fear with writing is actually that I’ll react badly to a review and make a fool of myself. However, both of these fears do have to do with showing your work to others! So before I go on to talk about rejection, let me share two of my personal favorite rejection anecdotes.
Sometime in the wilds of 2011, baby Lano had just agonized through her first edit. I was super proud of myself and put two chapters of a book on a review site. The first review I got was bad. And I mean, agonizingly, horrifyingly nasty. The kind of review that people dread. The kind that tell you to “stop writing” and that “the only character I like was the cat because he’s the only one that didn’t say anything idiotic”. And there was over a thousand words of that. Needless to say I cried for two days and I almost did give up writing before I realized that A) this guy was an asshole who got his jollies by trashing young authors and B) I would probably die if I stopped writing.
So I got over that. Then about two years ago I wrote a short story for a writing class that I was really proud of. I thought it was simple and clever and a nice homage to fairy tales. So that should be universal. I mean everyone has seen a Disney movie at least, right? Wrong. The only person who got it was the teacher, who then had to spend 45 minutes defending my story from my classmates while I couldn’t talk. And just to rub salt in the wound, one dude even thought the story was about a girl thinking she wasn’t as good as the men (so, so, sooooo wrong).
The point is, you’re gonna get bad reviews. You’re also going to get reviews from people who seemed to be reading another story entirely. You will definitely get reviews from people who think they can swoop in and ‘fix’ things. There is nothing you can do to avoid this except not writing, and let me tell you, that is an absolute waste of talent. No one can tell the stories you want to tell in the way you tell them and it’s cruel to deny us that.
Now, as for how to get past it:
For the most part I concentrate on pleasing myself. I know I have weaknesses, oh do I ever, but I love my work. I get teary at death scenes and blush when I’m writing romance. I laugh at all my own jokes. And I do my best to tell a story that I would want to read, as a reader. Cause there are people out there who read what I read, so they’ll probably like what I write. And I like to think that as long as I have fun, and do my best, that readers are going to pick up on that.
I also like to write as fast as possible so I don’t have time to think about it. I always think my subconscious mind is smarter than my conscious one. That’s why I can write a first draft in a week. I kind of have to get into that ‘zen’ state to do anything.
That’s why writing is the easy part for me. Editing is the hard part because it’s slow and boring. So in order to speed myself up I used Almond Joys, because I love those things. I made a deal with myself, set in writing and passed off to witnesses who kept track of my progress. Each time I finished a thousand words of editing I’d get to eat my almond joy, which I left sitting right at eye level to taunt myself. And every time I finished a page, I got a dollar put into a fund to spend at Half Price Books when I was over. That was enough incentive to get over any issues with editing because I’m super easy to bribe.
The important part of training yourself out of a fear like that is just to embrace that it’s going to happen. You will get a bad review. It’s going to suck. It’ll probably happen a lot and that sucks too. At some point I will probably get a bad review and burst into tears in public and make a fool of myself. It happens. But it’s not the end of the world. Because for every person who doesn’t like your writing there are probably ten people who do. You just have to find them. And trust me, one good review can wash away a hundred bad ones.
On the physical side, the important part of training yourself is to find rewards you really want, find a schedule that makes sense, and then don’t allow yourself to have those things outside of writing, ever. If you can keep it up for a month or more I promise you will get faster and shutting off that little voice will get easier. I mean I still like editing less than writing but now it’s at least kind of fun. Also if you don’t participate in National Novel Writing Month or other writing challenges, you really should because it forces you to just write. That helped me a lot in the beginning because I’m also very competitive and so racing the clock was the best way to get me to turn off my inner editor and just do.
As a general rule, with the exception of The Review (as I call it) I don’t remember my bad reviews? It’s a general sense of “not my thing” with a handful of “pointing out stuff I already know I’m weak at”. But I remember in perfect clarity every good review I’ve ever gotten. So, you know, there’s that.
I hope some of this helps? Really just concentrate on telling the story. Please your inner reader first. There will always be time for edits, later, but don’t get so caught up in edits that you never show it to people. When you’re looking for readers to review your work, find people who like the genre you’re writing. Listen to people when they tell you something’s wrong, but don’t listen to their suggestions of how to fix it. Most importantly of all, trust yourself and your stories/characters/intuition. If you don’t, no one else will either.
Also, probably don’t turn in a fairy tale to a review group of people who only write literary fiction.
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