Traveller, it's a good point. (And glad you approve of the blog post. Sorry I screwed up the link - if anyone else follows it, you need to take out the closing ). ) A friend once read an early novel of mine, which happened to have a letter on the first page. 'Oh, I hope it's not letters all the way through, I hate books with letters,' she said. It's the kind of thing we as readers say all the time, but of course I didn't put letters in a novel for the next five years. But guess what TMOL's full of?

This question of learning to pick your readers carefully is one of the reasons I think it's a good idea to take your writing as far as you can go on your own, before you seek help or teaching. The stronger a sense you have of what your own work's all about, and how your writerly self operates, as deb says, the better and more confidently you can map what others say onto your own experience and idea of the book, and decide if it helps or not, and discard the latter. I think it may be one of the most important things in your development as a writer.

But it takes courage and confidence to delay getting feedback, let alone finding teaching, because we all want the reassurance, and the sense of being heard, and we all want to feel we're not heading off for months into a writing wilderness which will turn out to be fruitless. Of course it's never fruitless - nothing you write is ever wasted, and all those 'failures' are actually part of the process. But that's another thing you only learn by doing...

One of the things about agents' and editors' views, though, is that they may be entirely correct about how your book works and its chances (or lack of them) in the market, but not be helpful to you as a writer. There are thousands of perfectly true things one can say about any piece of writing, but only a small proportion of them are things that get your writerly cogs going. When you get a good editor working with you on the book - as opposed to talking about its commercial prospects - then they say those kind of things. But they may well not say them in the rejection letter.

Emma

I think it's a good idea to take your writing as far as you can go on your own, before you seek help or teaching..... But it takes courage and confidence to delay getting feedback...

Yup, I'd second that. Don't show anyone your first draft however tempted you are to have a bit of hand-holding (as Stephen King says, first write with the door closed, ie, for your eyes only). Only when you've taken it as far as you can, should you 'open the door' and get a fresh take on it by having other people look at it.
Often there will be things nagging you about it, but you're not sure what's wrong or how to fix it, but if someone else picks up on it too, then you know you can trust their advice.
One thing that very often happens when you get advice, is to be defensive and try to justify the part that needs to be changed. That is perfectly natural (I do it myself), but give it a while to let it sink in, then you'll instinctively know if they are right, or wrong.

- NaomiM

I think it's also true not just of specific pieces, but of your writing skills in general, because by the end of a piece you've learnt such a lot, and may well be able to take your skills further yourself. If you finish a piece, and leave it, and look at it, and think, 'No, this doesn't quite work because I chose the wrong narrator, but now I know how to write that other story...' then sit down and write that other story. The time to go and find help is when you look at it and think, 'No, this doesn't quite work, and the last one didn't either, and I haven't the faintest idea why not, or what I could do next except more of the same...'

One thing that very often happens when you get advice, is to be defensive and try to justify the part that needs to be changed. That is perfectly natural (I do it myself), but give it a while to let it sink in, then you'll instinctively know if they are right, or wrong.

This is so true, and I do it too, all the time. It's why many writers circles and courses have a rule that all feedback is given without the writer being allowed to say anything until everyone's finished.

It's one tendency I've found with writing courses - with or without that rule - as opposed to (good) editing. On a course, someone says, 'Why did you do this?' Now that can be a very helpful question, if you defend it 'successfully', as it were, then you can feel you've solved the problem. Whereas a good editor will listen, and say, 'Okay. But I didn't get it.' Hopefully, they'll then not tell you to cut it, but to think about how to do whatever you were trying to better, or whether, yes, it would be better cut.

Emma

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but if you defend it 'successfully', as it were, then you can feel you've solved the problem

Another new-writer "rule" I loathe is "show don't tell". Don't even get me started. Of course I understand why the advice exists, but it's far from that simple. All storytelling rightly involves some telling as well as showing.

Yes, I've come to realise that some of my favourite books are those that "tell" a lot - but in imaginative and beautiful language. Marquez, for example, "tells" a lot. I find myself instinctively "telling" a lot - possibly because I've always been influenced by those kind of books. I agree that all works need to have the whole spectrum of "showing" and "telling"...it's when rules become bars to creativity or natural expression that they become very problematic. I was intrigued by the recent debate in relation to partial sentences...But the thing is, I'm beginning to think that editors are quite old-fashioned in their views on what works - it's worrying, because they're the gate-keepers of what gets published. Or, maybe it's the sales and marketing teams who have the final say. I don't know, but I think we're entering a new stage of the dumbing down of literature. Where individuality is dead. Where the novelist will be replaced by a computer software programme that will be able to generate specific sales figures based on an analysis of the combination of words that sell most - ie celebrity biographies. Maybe we should all be writing Katie Price novels - they certainly sell extremely well! (and I'm sure they don't have any partial sentences in them)

I do think that agents/editors only start looking for bad grammar and the like if for some reason the novel isn't doing it for them: If the very short or verb-less or whatever sentences are the perfect thing for that moment then they're not thinking, 'Hm, no main verb,' they're thinking, 'I love this voice, this character, I'm dying to know what happens next - pass me the phone!'

Conventional correctly constructed sentences are, as it were, invisible, rather like received pronunciation, if you like. If you use non-standard grammar/vocab/syntax, readers stumble on them unless they're the perfect non-standardism for that moment. In other words, as was said on the other thread the craft is about using the non-standard devices successfully, in the right place, so the artifice of doing something non-standard slips by the reader. The problem with the MS those editors were complaining about is that they're doing non-standard by mistake, and reading it is one long stumble.

Again with show/tell. What happens is that an editor first of all thinks, 'This was a nice idea but it isn't working - why?' And then they try to pin it down, and decide, 'Ah, all tell.' If tell's what's wanted, they're not thinking that, they're reading. I've just written a report for the writer of a terrific book which has slabs of what you might call tell in it, but they're great - the voice is brilliant and the ideas fascinating. What's to disapprove of?

I think it's the more insecure type of writing teacher and more fascist kind of how-to-write book who insist on show being better than tell and the insecure writer who clings to them. It's not nearly as simple as that. Good teachers and good books (such as there are) explain the difference, and help confident writers choose the right horse for the right course. (See my blog, under 'Teaching Writing' passim. )

Emma

Emma, how do you get the time to a) write a blog b) post on writewords c) write and research novels d) do all the other things published writers do..? I have come to the conclusion that you are in fact several entities or you've cloned yourself

Well I asked a couple of my other selves, and they pointed out that actually I'm between novels at the moment - both in the sense that TMOL is old news, publicity-wise and ASA isn't yet in pre-publication mode, and in the sense that I'm not writing another one yet (more's the pity, though I'm doing research in the gaps where I can). And that blogging doesn't take that long. And that WW is the best procrastination-place ever.

Actually, a lot that's now going into the PhD I worked out on the blog, and most of what I witter about on the blog was first prompted by something on WW, so what goes around comes around, and I've even heard of TMOL being bought by people who first encountered it on the blog. Must go, several selves say it's past their bedtime...

Emma

Emma, that all makes a lot of sense. IOW, if you write something which 'works' and is truly effective, then if you've done it in an idiosyncratic way it's often a plus. But idiosyncratic writing which doesn't work tends to be even more tedious than bland or conventional writing which doesn't work.

Deb

Yes, I agree absolutely - Writewords is a good 'limbo' - or interstitial space. I don't think it's procrastination because you can learn some interesting things on here.