Hello everyone! We are finally here for the last post in the small skills series. I’m so excited to share what little I know about this skill and then move onto a new and exciting series. I hope that you are all just as excited as I am to finally keep going on to another series! This post has moved on from the actual writing skills and I call this post-writing skills. There are four that I’m going to talk about in this post. So without further ado here we go!
Small Skills: Accepting Hard Things In Writing
There are a lot of hard things in writing. On the top writing sounds like a really simple and easy skill to learn but I know that it isn’t nearly as easy as everyone makes it out to seem. But with a little dedication and willingness to learn it also isn’t as hard as some people would make it out to be. With perseverance and learning new skills anyone can write something noteworthy. With that in mind I’ve chosen 4 items that I’ve found most writers will agree is the hardest things with writing. First, editing. Second, first drafts. Third, taking critique from others. And fourth, the difference in time. I’m going to address each of these and explain kind of what makes them hard and some suggestions on how to accept or deal with them.
First, Editing. I am a major hater of editing. I have a hard time editing my own writing. I just simply read it and I think it’s perfect. But then on second or third read throughs you realize what’s missing and then it starts to drive you nuts. What bothers me about editing is that it’s changing something you’ve already written. I can’t help but feel like this novel or short story or poem are my babies. I wrote them that way for a reason but having to change them is a little weird. I think that editing for grammatical errors to small fixes in character names or things like that aren’t too bad. It’s almost as if you’re just fixing something wrong with your manuscript.
The editing I think is the hardest to accept is major editing, like getting rid of a whole character. Those edits really hurt your soul. Another one is when you’re writing and realize that if you add this one scene a lot of the things your characters have been doing or saying will make more sense but you really don’t want to write that scene because it is going to be really boring to write. The other kind of major editing that I think is really hard for a writer is anytime you have to get rid of a large chunk of story and rewrite it with something completely different. I had an experience with this in which I was writing a story where I had to delete 3 whole scenes because the character acted in the exact opposite of how they should’ve with their character motivation from earlier stories. Then I had to write a few scenes to replace this to help with the flow of the story that fit more with character motivation.
I’m not really sure how to explain how to deal with editing. I think it just really depends on the type of person. For me I just make sure that when I ‘delete’ anything I don’t actually just erase. I simply mark it as unused. For example, when I had to delete those 3 scenes that didn’t fit with character motivation I didn’t permanently delete them from a document or throw away the papers. I put them in a new document on my computer and labeled it as not of use. Generally I try to reuse things that weren’t of use in a certain story in another that fits it better.
Second, First drafts. First drafts are terrifying. First drafts never really stay the same as when you first write them. I don’t think I have ever read a single story that was an unedited first draft that doesn’t happen. When a novel is finally completed and often times published it is not the same as what you wrote in your first draft. And first drafts aren’t always one single written manuscript either. My current series is has books that are half first drafts and the other half is a mix of third or fourth drafts. My biggest problem with first drafts is I don’t write in chronological order so often I have scenes I wrote for book 3 when I first started the series 6 years ago that have undergone multiple edits and I have scenes for that same book that I wrote a couple weeks back. I consider these scenes first drafts. My story is definitely not the same idea I started with when I first began the very first drafts in 2014.
How to deal with first drafts? I think it’s to realize that first drafts are never perfect and that you can only make your idea better. Don’t dwell on the fact that you are changing your story too much. Just think of your first draft as extended free writing and brainstorming. If you think in this way, it also makes it easier and faster to write the story.
Third, taking critique from others. Taking critique from others is hard. Like I said during the editing section, your writing just feels like your baby. You don’t want anyone to touch it or change anything about it. When people read and review and suggest edits for your writing it makes you really nervous. Some of the stuff people write makes you feel like what you wrote is crap or that someone really hates it. It’s hard to read critiques for your writing and not feel a little hurt by it. Its natural.
The best way to overcome this one is to keep in mind the mind of a reviewer. 9 times out of 10 when someone gives you a review or suggestions for editing, they aren’t saying it because they dislike what you wrote. If they disliked what you wrote, they would simply have walked away and not put the time in to actually read the whole thing. As someone who reviews writing for others quite a bit I can say that if I don’t like the reading I don’t bother reading enough of it to critique. And when I give reviews or suggestions for edits to someone it’s not because I think their story sucks. It’s because I think they’re story is amazing and I want it to succeed and so I have some suggestions to help make it even better. And ultimately it comes down to the writers to decide to keep those edits or not. They’re just suggestions. A good idea though for when receiving edits that hurt your feelings, don’t lash out in anger. Take a step back, consider what they said, or just don’t think about it for a while and then come back. 95% of the time I’ve realized after coming back that what they said is true in some ways.
Fourth, the difference in time. I don’t know if this one bothers as many authors as it bothers me. This one drives me nuts. It takes SO long to write anything. I’ve been working on a 5 book series for 6 years. Some authors will have several years between books in a series. Writing is a pretty complicated and long process. Even if you are the most skilled writer on the whole planet who only has to write two or three drafts of something before its one hundred percent perfect, its still going to take a while to write it in the first place. And then getting published (if you’re getting published traditionally, I don’t know much about self publishing) takes a long time as well. Even if you cut out all the time between finding a publisher and getting them to accept your manuscript, the publishing process takes a while as well. And then when a reader reads these books that takes years and sometimes decades to get to a shelf, they read it in a short amount of time. A lot of the time it only takes people a couple weeks. A couple months at the most. And then they want the next book and they have to wait several more years because writing a book just takes so long.
The only way I can reconcile this to myself is to think to myself, what I am writing now is the best of that thing I can create. I am taking all that extra time to make it great so that all of those years I spent writing it will be equaled out by how many readers enjoy the story and how many readers read my story AGAIN because I spent so long writing something that would be just perfect and that everyone would enjoy.
So those are the 4 things that I think are the hardest to accept in writing. And those are the last small skills for this series. I’m so excited that you were all able to stick around for this weeks post. I’m so grateful to all of my returning readers who came back to follow me again after my hiatus. Thank you so much everyone! I’m so glad that I was able to finally wrap up this series. Next week we’ll be starting a new series called Writing Tools and Resources. I’m excited for this series as well. I’m not sure how many posts it will have yet but I’m looking forward to it anyway.
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Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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