It can be a bruising experience, spending a week having your work criticised. However nice the critic is, however much you respect them, and however much they tie themselves in knots trying to say things as positively as possible, the message still comes through that your writing is less than perfect.
Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. If you’re honest with yourself, you know what a struggle it was in that middle section. You know there are parts you really, really meant to go back and revise and then forgot about. You know that there were some days – in the nine months you took writing that book – when you had the flu, or you were struggling at work, or when your cat was dying. And, let’s face it, some days you were just damned lazy and had no excuses at all.
So the publisher told me I’d let the pace sag in the middle of my book and I’d given away the ending in my prologue, and the author told me I wasn’t polishing each and every last one of my 90,000 words as highly as I should be and some of my sentences weren’t razor sharp the wa they need to be. So I sit and brood and think that’s why I didn’t get a contract right there and then. And it’s a little humiliating and it’s a little hurtful.
But you do this to yourself because, as much fun as it is to write books, it would be fun too to see them published – and to be paid for your work. And that means plaesing other people and writing to their standards. So the thing you have to listen to while you’re copping all that criticism, is the praise that goes with it. The publisher also said some very flattering things about how I’d done some excellent writing in other parts of the book. The author pointed out passages she had particularly enjoyed. The fact of it is that I can write well and I do write well – I just need to do it more consistently and to be a bit more self-critical. And I need to go back and do those things that the flu, the cat, or just laziness left undone in the first draft.
I also learnt one very useful trick. The publisher told me to go back to my manuscript – on paper, not on the screen – and read it all the way through from start to finish in a single sitting. It seemed like an unnecessary waste of a good many hours when she told me but I did it and now I will always do it with each and every draft. It makes the structure of the book leap out at you and it clearly reveals the pace and quality of the various sections. In a way it is like taking the perspective of your readers – especially those readers like publishers, editors and agents who tend always to read this way – seeing the text as they would see it. You become aware of it as a finished object rather than as the fluid and changing set of ideas that constantly shape and re-shape themselves to your imagination. For the first time, you see your manuscript as a book.
So I’m back from my Orbit/QWC retreat, full of new enthusiasms and insights and ready to get to work on making my book better. Once I’m over the emotional trauma, that is.
