Group Anxiety
The thought of the writing group actually critiquing my story is giving me the shakes. It’s not that I think they will be cruel – because they aren’t cruel people. It’s more that I know they will be honest, with both the good and the bad. It’s what I need. If I ever want to be published I need help polishing my writing. I need to be able to look at it without rose-colored glasses… and also without the judge sitting over my shoulder and yammering in my ear.
But I’m afraid they will laugh. Will wonder aloud why I even bother. Clearly I have no talent. Clearly my stories are just childish scribblings. All of the confidence that I’ve built so slowly over the past few years has slipped away and I’m thanking God that it’s Thursday and I still have three days (after today which, after all, isn’t even half over yet) before Monday.
I need to work on the story I’m submitting before I send it out. I want to change Michael from a singer to a poet. I want to make it less band-centered. Really, that’s almost secondary. Instead I sit, staring at the screen, biting my cuticles and all I can hear is the shouting of the judge. He says all the things I imagine the members of the group telling me during their critique. It’s enough to make me want to skip the whole thing altogether. “You suck! Look at that line, useless! The dialog is stilted. Unreal. Horrible. What a trite paragraph. Yawn, I’m sooo bored. Wow, this writing is terrible. Juvenile. Lame. Lifeless. Over-written.†It’s a mix of my own overly healthy anxiety and Prof. Clay’s harsh (but somewhat true) criticism. The judge isn’t a good writer himself though, as you can see. No concrete suggestions, just blanket criticism.
The thing that scares me the most is the thought that they will echo what the judge says. It’s easier to dismiss his words as my own fear. But once someone agrees with those fears, it makes them real. If other people think I’m not a good writer, well then – I must not be. My own feeling of skill is irrelevant. As is Emily and Mel’s encouragement. Both of them are my friends. I don’t necessarily believe they’d be honest with me if something wasn’t good. I do believe this group will be honest. Because they aren’t my ‘friends’ they aren’t worried about not hurting my feelings.
It’s what I need. I know this. But I’m afraid of it, too. I don’t want to lose this hope that I’ve kindled in the past 6 years since graduating and leaving Prof. Clayton behind. I’m not sure how to hold on to my dream of being published if I can’t even submit a story piece to a writing group. How much harder will it be to send something to a publisher and get it rejected? The publishing world is not that easy to get into. So, unless I want to call it a day now and only ‘publish’ online and with friends, I’d better take myself in hand and keep working.
Instead I write this, hoping that giving the judge voice and writing through my discomfort will make some sort of change happen. Unfreeze my fingers and loose the knots in my stomach. I only have a couple of hours to revise the story. Then it’ll be emailed out, ready or not.
Posted on October 28th, 2004 by Kat
Filed under: Writing, General
I pop by to see what’s going on in your head now and then, and I have thought about commenting before, but I’ve never been able to put into words what I am feeling (I spent about 2 hours trying to work out in words my thoughts on the entry about causing feelings of religious faith, since I can’t credit faith to just a chemical reaction in the brain). I’m not even sure what I want to say will make sense now, but I feel really strongly about this, so I’m going to try.
It kind of hurt that you consider the encouragement I give irrelevant. Not in a lasting way, which is part of why I’m responding, but in a ‘huh, weird’ kind of way.
We’ve known each other for only a year and a half, but it feels like I have known you forever (in a good way). I can’t remember what life was like before your friendship, and I don’t want to think what life would be like without it. I trust and I love you, something I can’t say about all that many people really. It is because of that trust that I can be and am completely honest with you, and that honesty is reflected in every bit of encouragement I give.
I could say, “You know, you’ve got a comma splice here,†or any number of other anal retentive grammatical or mechanical things, but I don’t because they aren’t important. What I consider to be important is the message of the writing, the richness, and what is said. How it is said, well, that’s what editors are for.
It comes down to this: I trust in our friendship enough that I can be honest. If I think something is lame, I will tell you because whatever is said won’t have a lasting impact on how I feel. I expect that you will hear what I have to say and either get something out of it or ignore it, but also that in the end, what was said won’t change the friendship we have.
I can’t think of a single bad idea that you have had. I can’t think of a time when your writing didn’t have that element of the extraordinary that makes something worth reading. I am always amazed at how you can put so much emotion into a character that is just words on a page. Yeah, there have been some punctuation errors and the odd strange sounding sentence. Everyone makes those errors, and everyone has the odd strange sentence. Again, that’s what an editor is for (but if you want someone to go all anal on the grammar, I’m your girl!). It just happens that you haven’t had a lame idea yet, so I haven’t had to be honest about lameness.
If you can trust a group of strangers to be honest because they don’t care if they hurt your feelings, then it’s great that you found this group. Anonymity is a wonderful thing, and it can be a lot easier to expose something intimate and personal to strangers because you know you won’t have to look them in the face when it is over. However, it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind that your friends care about you enough to tell you the truth, even if the truth isn’t pleasant. They can be honest because they trust that the friendship is stronger than a bit of negative feedback (kinda like what I am doing now, so don’t hate me).
-Melly
(PS - It took all freaking day to get this written. I sure hope it makes sense…)