An author's dilemma...

Every writer writes, in the first instance, for themselves.  We write what we want to write.  What we MUST write.  Because the voices in our head won’t leave us alone.  So, we begin to write.  Sometimes the words pour out.  Sometimes the writer has to hammer out the prose word by painful word.  But it is happening.  We are writing.  We are writers.

The luckiest and most persistent eventually get to a point where we are happy(ish) with what we’ve written.  It is finished.  Done.  Out of our heads and onto the page.  And this point marks a watershed in the writer’s life.  For now the text we have produced exists in its own right.  We have written.  What next?

Next we want to show our work to someone.  It is no longer an idea, trapped in our heads, vague, inchoate... It is there, fully formed, and on the page.  An entity into which we have poured everything we can to bring it to life.  Now we seek recognition for that stupendous act of creation.  We want the child of our imagination to be acknowledged.  Loved.

We want our first readers to like our creation.  We want readers to be kind.  We hand over our manuscript with trepidation, with fear in case they don’t like it.  At heart, we want our readers to say how wonderful the story is, how brilliant we were to have written it.  We seek praise.

Which presents us with our dilemma.  For praise is of no use to us, as writers.  Praise, at first delightful, soon sours because praise is easy to give and means nothing without insight.  Praise is like poisoned ice cream, delicious but deadly to our development as writers.  What we really need is feedback.

Feedback hurts.  Oh, yes, positive feedback is a wonderful thing but the feedback we need most is the negative stuff.  We need to know what didn’t work for the reader.  Where they lost the plot (quite literally) and got confused.  Or bored.  We have got too close to our literary baby, in the long months of its gestation, to see it clearly. We need help.

Maybe there is too much repetition.  Or not enough clarification.  The carefully developed plot which we are so thrilled with may have the pace of an arthritic tortoise.  The characters are as wooden as Pinocchio before that wish upon a star. And we CAN’T TELL!

A reader who can give us this necessary feedback is worth his or her weight in diamonds.  They must steer a difficult course.  We need an honest analysis of our work and honesty can be hard to hear.  But self-delusion is not the writer’s friend.  We are overly biased to think our work is good simply because we know how many hours of solid work, sweat and agony, went into its creation.  Now, though, we need perspective.

We need to hear which parts are good, what worked.  But also, we need to know where we failed.  Where the story lagged.  Because then we have the information we need to start to fix it.  No work of creation is born painlessly.  And, however much a writer may hate to hear criticism of their work, only by opening up to that process and seeking honest opinions can we hope to grow and develop in our writing craft.

The white heat of creation is an essential part of our writer’s process but so, too, is the detachment necessary to see our work through the eyes of others.  For, it is that step which moves us on from merely writing to becoming an author.  So be brave and ask your beta readers what they DON'T like about your book!