Accept it

Well, we’ve come at long last to the final week in our series on dos and don'ts. It’s always a strange feeling for me, when that happens. Mostly because it means the month is over, and I suddenly realize just how quickly the weeks have passed. Have you noticed they seem to be moving faster, each year?

I’ve digressed again, haven’t I?

We’d best remedy that.

Now, I know this topic may seem familiar to some of you, but that’s because I came at it from a different angle, a couple weeks ago. Today, I want to take a new spin on it. Let’s look at it in the positive—which is something a lot of us (even me) struggle to do.

Accept Criticism

I know. It seems contrary to everything you’ve ever wanted to do. Why on earth would we want to hear all the negative things someone has to say about our work? How could we possibly hope to just sit there and take it all, to listen to all these things and not be able to bite back, to say how stupid that person is for not understanding the brilliance of our novel?

But that’s not a positive spin at all, is it?

Here’s what you should really be asking yourself, when someone criticizes your work:

Are they right in what they’re saying? 

Are their words simply biting, or do they hold purpose? 

Is their intention to help you, or to hinder? 

Have they come to you with kindness, or with pride? 

Is this a person whose words you can trust, or who you know to be untrustworthy?

These are all things that we need to consider, but we tend to ignore them and go straight to the rage. Friends, let’s not do that. Responding with anger only begets more anger, and that’s really the last thing this world needs. Seriously. Have you seen the news?

So here’s what we need to remember:

Some people only mean to lash out, when they criticize. That doesn’t give you the right to snap back at them. You don’t know what’s going on in their head. Maybe they just got fired, and they need to yell at someone. You don’t know. Consider that, before you respond.

Some people honestly mean to help. Again, you’ve no reason to chew them out for it. They thought they were doing a good thing, by critiquing your work. It didn’t occur to them that you might take offense to it. Consider that, before you respond.

And above all, remember this:

No work is perfect.

None.

And no one will ever write a book that everyone on earth loves and cherishes and thinks of as the greatest book ever.

There will always be people out there who don’t like your work. And there will also be people who do. But some people in both categories will critique you, and you need to learn to take it. You need to learn to see through their words, to understand the angle from which they’re coming, and learn to use their words for the betterment of your work.

That’s what critique is for, whether the criticizer intended it to be used that way or not.

[love]

{Rani D.}

Keep Going

Most of you probably already know this, and you’ll agree with me right from the start. Others won’t, which is one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to write on this topic, today. Because we all need to understand it, from the very beginning.

Don’t Write Only One Draft

See? I told you a lot of you would agree with me. But there are still some of you out there who won’t, and for that, I’m going to continue.

First drafts are meant to be not very good. They’re our first efforts to get everything onto the page, to get it all out of our heads and where we can look at it and see what it is, and admire it in all its slimy, bloody glory. But that’s just the thing. It’s intended to be a mess, to be the birth of a crying baby that needs a lot of work before anyone really wants to be in the same room with it. Except, of course, its parents.

But we’re not meant to just leave it at that one draft. It's not meant to stay a baby.

Yeah, I know, when you finish it, it seems like the most beautiful thing in the world and like nothing could possibly be better than this draft, but you’re in the just-finished-my-novel high. And you can’t let that high get the better of you. Your novel needs to be edited, by you. You’ll need to go through it at least once, cut out what doesn’t need to be there, mend what needs mending.

You need a second draft.

A third.

Sometimes a fourth.

Even a fifth.

And I know by then it gets really annoying, and you’re more than ready to be done just so you never have to look at these words again, but this is a very important step. Before you send your work to an editor, before you even consider trying to get it published, you need to get beyond the first draft.

In order to really learn what your story is about, you need to get to draft two. To find out what’s really going on with your characters, you need to get to draft three. In order to get the attention of a publishing house, you should really get to draft four.

But before you get an editor, you should at least get to draft three, in my opinion. Get to where you really know your book, to where you really understand its ins and outs and where you’re getting to the point that you’re just plain done and ready to never read it again. Then, send it to an editor. Let someone else look it over, and let them make sense of it. Because at that point, you’ll probably be unable to spot the errors that are left—and that’s when an editor comes most in handy.

I would know. I’m an editor. And a writer.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Entirely Necessary

So now you know why you need to accept criticism, but now I want to take it one step further. It’s more than just accepting what people say about your work, about than just accepting the fact that some people will not like what you do and others will, or about the fact that some people want to help you better your craft, and others don’t. It’s about making your work better than it could ever have been before—because you could never be your own editor.

Don’t Avoid Editors

I know the thing to do these days is to just go out and get self-published, to do it all yourself so you don’t have to deal with an editor and the so-called mess they’ll make of your novel… but that’s really not the way you should go about things.

If you’re going to self-publish, and you’ve determined that that’s the road you want to go down, then you need to make sure that you get an editor. A lot of self-publishing packages tell you that they come with professional editing, and let me tell you right now, as someone who’s been through that process: they’re lying. They’ll have someone try to edit, but it won’t work out very well, and you’ll be left with a mess of typographical errors that a real editor would’ve caught.

I know, I know, you’ll remind me that I recently told you there are always errors, in every published work. And that’s very true. But there are far more errors found in self-published works than there are in regularly published ones, all because of the editing.

You can’t avoid editors forever. Really. You can’t.

And you shouldn’t. 

At some point, you need to learn that editors really are here for your benefit. And not all of us will charge you an arm and a leg to edit your manuscript.

We’re here to help you, to get your work to a much better place than it is right now. We’re here to point out some errors you might have missed, to make sure you don’t have any plot holes, and to generally ensure that your book will be far better received.

You can’t do all that on your own. You just can’t.

For one thing, as I often say, you’ll never be able to catch every typo you make, and you won’t notice when something doesn’t read right—because you wrote it, and your brain automatically reads it the way you meant it to be, always.

That’s not a good thing! 

We want our readers to not be confused by our work, to understand everything as we meant it to be, not to have to sit there and wonder how this phrase even makes sense in the constructs of the English language. That what editors are here for, to make sure all that confusion gets weeded out, so that everything (or at least, mostly everything) makes sense within your story. 

Remember, it's not the editor who shines when you release an awesome novel. It's you. We're just your backup. 

Our ultimate goal is to be releasing work that the public enjoys, that’s good enough to be picked up by the persnicketiest (yes, I just made a word) of readers, and believe that they’ll enjoy it. Our goal is to get your work to the highest possible level before publication, so you don't have readers coming to you with a list of typos that you need to fix. We want you to release work that people will say is well written, whether they liked the story or not.

Can you honestly say that, without editing?

The answer is no, whether you admit it or not.

It’s blunt, but it’s the truth. You need an editor.

[love]

{Rani Divine}