FilkOntario news and other musings
Nov. 19th, 2004 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msagaraI have news. I am the Special Author Guest at FilkOntario this coming April (the 1-3, and the first person to make April Fools jokes gets it between the eyes. I'm just saying.) I've never been to a filk convention; I've spent many hours listening to filkers at various broad-base conventions. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andpuff was their first author guest, and she loved it enough that she went out and started taking singing lessons and guitar lessons. And she plays and sings. In public. I'm probably not that brave. But I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm trying to figure out what, absent performing, I have to offer the convention.
The Filkontario website is http://www.filkontario.ca, and it has more information.
I admire actors and actresses who can go, perform, put their hearts into their performances and be summarily dismissed. Or be complimented, but in an empty way, as in, no job. When writers face rejection, while we put our hearts into the words, we're protected by some distance, both figurative and literal; we can hide behind the words while we continue to chip away at them, trying to improve, believing that when we finally reach a certain plateau, we'll have a book in our hands.
In the old days, the distance was greater (yes, yes, I know, I'm talking like a dinosaur. And creaking). In the old days, when there was no easily accessible network of fellow writers, one could rant and rail and weep and shred paper, and the witnesses were friends and our spouses, who could understand our feelings of rejection and inadequacy. We had days. Or even weeks. We could do these things and no one would point at us and call us unprofessional. Was this mature? No, of course not, but that's the point. We all grieve in our own way.
Now, it seems to me that many people are entering bootcamp. That they're being drilled by sergeants who want to toughen them up. That being upset or disappointed in any obvious way is a sign of being a sissy or a girl, in the context of the analogy. But guess what? Human. It's an absolutely natural reaction.
So is the doubt. So is the certainty that everything -- every single word -- you write is crap. So is the certainty that everything you write is brilliant. And all of these feelings come into play when you ask for critiques. Because you are opening yourself up every time you write -- and every time you expose that writing to the criticism of other people.
I've seen authors get editorial revision letters; they rant and rail like the best of us. They don't do it in public -- but public is becoming a more diffuse term on the internet. More on that in a minute. They are professional, imnsho, because they then recover, and go on to do the work the story demands. In my context of professional, that's all it means: you get the job done without skinning the people around you.
The first time you sell a book, there's a sense of both pride and desperation, and less of a willingness to appear human. To be professional is to court the slings and arrows of revision, and to do it well. But taking the time to grind teeth -- hating yourself for missing things, hating the fact that you have to make things more obvious, whichever your poison is -- seems to me to be entirely reasonable.
It's called venting.
Back to the days of the dinosaur, and snail mail. Since everything took weeks, the weeks gave you time to take a deep breath, to calm down, to put your head in order, and to approach the task with a bit of distance and objectivity.
After a while, you get good at it. You develop a much shorter response/recovery time. After a while, you actually welcome and depend on the responses of the editors you work with to help you with the things that you did miss, and it doesn't hurt so much -- because the downside of not listening is actually worse. Reviews are unkind, and often accurate. But the down time? I think it's necessary.
And I think it's harder and harder to give ourselves downtime when information travels at the speed of typing. It's too easy to respond in a moment of bewilderment or pain. When I was a child, I hated criticism of my writing; I had a feeling that if I loved it, and I also loved books, the love was equivalence -- it couldn't be horrible. So I hid my writing, but kept on doing it.
Most of what I wrote back then is absolutely dreadful. Truly, horribly, embarrassingly dreadful. But had anyone told me that then, I would have been crushed. Yes, okay, child. But the point is that it was my first writing, and I was so emotionally attached to it, I couldn't bear to see it justifiably savaged.
With my first novel, there were problems, because there always are. And the emotions I had then were more mixed. Talking to an editor who might actually buy the book helped because I really didn't want to look like a big doofus. But you know? Still hurt.
And I had time to get over that. Because I sent snail mail. I had time to compose a reply, and then to have second thoughts about it, and then to edit it, and then to pay attention, and see the value of the criticism once the shock had faded and my emotions were once again in the backseat while my brain was driving. Sometimes talking on the phone is better, for this, because you can hear the tone of voice behind the words; the words are trickier without that because it's easy to invest them with your own doubt and your sense of inadequacy.
Once the first book was in print, I realized I couldn't go back and fix it. That for as long as it was in print, that's what it was going to be like. And that changed the way I viewed writing, and the way I viewed editing and revisions of my story, pretty much forever.
Writers who first enter workshops can often be crushed by them, especially if a group dynamic that works is already in place and they haven't quite meshed with that dynamic. Some writers aren't meant for workshopping; it's just not in their temperament, and I know many who are published novelists who would die first. Without the carrot and stick of possible publication, new writers who have yet to publish react publicly and emotionally to things that are said about their work.
So. My advice to people who have that emotional reaction: Wait. Give it a few days. Let the information settle. Lick your wounds. Don't respond instantly. Just think about it until you can think about it without feeling run over. Don't storm out of a group instantly; don't respond for a minimum of 48 hours. Type a response if it helps, but sit on it, and wait.
andpuff was their first author guest, and she loved it enough that she went out and started taking singing lessons and guitar lessons. And she plays and sings. In public. I'm probably not that brave. But I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm trying to figure out what, absent performing, I have to offer the convention.The Filkontario website is http://www.filkontario.ca, and it has more information.
I admire actors and actresses who can go, perform, put their hearts into their performances and be summarily dismissed. Or be complimented, but in an empty way, as in, no job. When writers face rejection, while we put our hearts into the words, we're protected by some distance, both figurative and literal; we can hide behind the words while we continue to chip away at them, trying to improve, believing that when we finally reach a certain plateau, we'll have a book in our hands.
In the old days, the distance was greater (yes, yes, I know, I'm talking like a dinosaur. And creaking). In the old days, when there was no easily accessible network of fellow writers, one could rant and rail and weep and shred paper, and the witnesses were friends and our spouses, who could understand our feelings of rejection and inadequacy. We had days. Or even weeks. We could do these things and no one would point at us and call us unprofessional. Was this mature? No, of course not, but that's the point. We all grieve in our own way.
Now, it seems to me that many people are entering bootcamp. That they're being drilled by sergeants who want to toughen them up. That being upset or disappointed in any obvious way is a sign of being a sissy or a girl, in the context of the analogy. But guess what? Human. It's an absolutely natural reaction.
So is the doubt. So is the certainty that everything -- every single word -- you write is crap. So is the certainty that everything you write is brilliant. And all of these feelings come into play when you ask for critiques. Because you are opening yourself up every time you write -- and every time you expose that writing to the criticism of other people.
I've seen authors get editorial revision letters; they rant and rail like the best of us. They don't do it in public -- but public is becoming a more diffuse term on the internet. More on that in a minute. They are professional, imnsho, because they then recover, and go on to do the work the story demands. In my context of professional, that's all it means: you get the job done without skinning the people around you.
The first time you sell a book, there's a sense of both pride and desperation, and less of a willingness to appear human. To be professional is to court the slings and arrows of revision, and to do it well. But taking the time to grind teeth -- hating yourself for missing things, hating the fact that you have to make things more obvious, whichever your poison is -- seems to me to be entirely reasonable.
It's called venting.
Back to the days of the dinosaur, and snail mail. Since everything took weeks, the weeks gave you time to take a deep breath, to calm down, to put your head in order, and to approach the task with a bit of distance and objectivity.
After a while, you get good at it. You develop a much shorter response/recovery time. After a while, you actually welcome and depend on the responses of the editors you work with to help you with the things that you did miss, and it doesn't hurt so much -- because the downside of not listening is actually worse. Reviews are unkind, and often accurate. But the down time? I think it's necessary.
And I think it's harder and harder to give ourselves downtime when information travels at the speed of typing. It's too easy to respond in a moment of bewilderment or pain. When I was a child, I hated criticism of my writing; I had a feeling that if I loved it, and I also loved books, the love was equivalence -- it couldn't be horrible. So I hid my writing, but kept on doing it.
Most of what I wrote back then is absolutely dreadful. Truly, horribly, embarrassingly dreadful. But had anyone told me that then, I would have been crushed. Yes, okay, child. But the point is that it was my first writing, and I was so emotionally attached to it, I couldn't bear to see it justifiably savaged.
With my first novel, there were problems, because there always are. And the emotions I had then were more mixed. Talking to an editor who might actually buy the book helped because I really didn't want to look like a big doofus. But you know? Still hurt.
And I had time to get over that. Because I sent snail mail. I had time to compose a reply, and then to have second thoughts about it, and then to edit it, and then to pay attention, and see the value of the criticism once the shock had faded and my emotions were once again in the backseat while my brain was driving. Sometimes talking on the phone is better, for this, because you can hear the tone of voice behind the words; the words are trickier without that because it's easy to invest them with your own doubt and your sense of inadequacy.
Once the first book was in print, I realized I couldn't go back and fix it. That for as long as it was in print, that's what it was going to be like. And that changed the way I viewed writing, and the way I viewed editing and revisions of my story, pretty much forever.
Writers who first enter workshops can often be crushed by them, especially if a group dynamic that works is already in place and they haven't quite meshed with that dynamic. Some writers aren't meant for workshopping; it's just not in their temperament, and I know many who are published novelists who would die first. Without the carrot and stick of possible publication, new writers who have yet to publish react publicly and emotionally to things that are said about their work.
So. My advice to people who have that emotional reaction: Wait. Give it a few days. Let the information settle. Lick your wounds. Don't respond instantly. Just think about it until you can think about it without feeling run over. Don't storm out of a group instantly; don't respond for a minimum of 48 hours. Type a response if it helps, but sit on it, and wait.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 01:28 pm (UTC)You appear to have dropped the closing bracket in your opening paragraph.. ;D
no subject
Date: 2004-11-20 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 02:42 am (UTC)I was too sick to go to the store today so I figured I was safe.. *g*
no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 06:38 pm (UTC)Thank you for catching the brackets; with the html tags mixed in, I seem incapable of actually closing one.
And you're in trouble for what you said on the list; the bracket was nothing <g>. You'll be healthy again sometime, you know. You'll have to be...
no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 09:18 pm (UTC)What *I* said on the list was *nothing* compared to what Terry said after... ;D