Today’s guest blogger is Gavin Cramblet (aka Chro) from a blogsite we like called Journey of the Scribe. Recently, Gavin won the bid for a free critiquing session with novelist Brenda Novak, and he agreed to share his experience with us.

Our sincere thanks to Gavin for taking the time out to blog with us this week. Enjoy!

While I was growing up, I noticed one glaring difference between me and my three siblings: I actually listened to my father. While he was droning on about topics we couldn’t care less about, like civil war battles or the joys of investing, my siblings would zone out, while I absorbed every word, as much as it bored me. With my overactive writer’s imagination, I’m a perfect candidate for daydreaming, and yet I can’t help but listen to people. This is why I can’t write while the TV is on: I have to listen to the characters on screen, even if it’s an inane family sitcom that kills 100 brain cells per minute.

Listening is an important skill as a writer, and not just because you have to be perceptive in order to find inspiration for your works. To have any hope of publication, you must admit that other people in the world do not think the same way you do. Your baby will be perceived by a wide variety of readers, and you must appeal to those readers, even the idiots who don’t understand your artistic vision. This is why we have critique groups and beta readers: so that we can absorb the opinions of those mysterious ‘other people’ and give our works more mass appeal.

But listening to other opinions is hard, because a writer’s instinctive reaction is to defend their work, and tell the critic they’re wrong. For example, Jodi Meadows recently spent two weeks giving out personalized letters to anyone who was rejected by the Lori Perkins Literary Agency. For anyone who’s received a frustratingly useless form rejection in the mail, this was a great offer. Naturally, most people were grateful. But others trashed her online, claiming that her advice was vague, ill-informed, or flat out wrong.

The official term for such people is ‘tools’.

Refusing to listen to someone’s opinion doesn’t accomplish anything. You may not agree entirely with their suggestions, but every comment they make is (most likely) an honest one, and will resonate with at least a portion of the general population. To quote James D. Macdonald (writer and instructor for the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop): “If someone tells you something is wrong with your work, they’re almost certainly right. If they tell you how to fix it, they’re almost certainly wrong.”

For example, this year I participated in Brenda Novak’s annual online auction to find a cure for diabetes. One of the ‘items’ offered was a critique of your first three novel chapters by an agent/editor/author. I won the chance to send my work to a professional editor at an established publishing house, and I was eager to receive an honest opinion about my work. I think I put ‘BE BLUNT!’ about 5 times in my e-mail to her.

She wrote back with a reasonably positive review, saying I clearly knew how to write and had a talent for pacing, among other things. There was just one teeny little problem. My book was unsellable.

Insert the sound clip of a heart shattering here, followed by melancholy violin music.

I had written a child protagonist that was extremely violent — as in, he actually kills people. Despite the fact that he learns the error of his ways and tries to make amends, despite the fact that I pitch the book as an adult novel, my work would be perceived in the publishing world as a lawsuit waiting to happen. I’d be ‘promoting’ kids to take knives to school and kill each other.

Her suggestion was to make my main character an adult. Now, she hadn’t read my whole novel, so she didn’t know that this was impossible. Innumerable plot points were based around the fact that my MC was only a kid, and changing him to an adult would be the equivalent of changing the titanic to a bus, or making Ebenezer Scrooge a shoe-shine boy. Naturally, my initial reaction to her critique was, “What is she, crazy?! She doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”

Not listening at all would’ve been the easy way out. But this wasn’t the first time someone mentioned about this issue; a beta reader of mine had similar concerns. I just didn’t listen before. Even though this editor was just another subjective opinion, I decided that her comment was valid, even though her solution wasn’t. Eventually, I came up with another solution to the problem, which required major revisions to my work, but still kept the work intact. And honestly, my book is a lot better for it.

In a world where political parties, religions, and sitcom characters get in the most trouble when they don’t listen to each other, don’t be another one of those authors that follows their ‘vision’ so blindly that they refuse to hear other voices. Listen to every piece of advice you receive, and actually consider its validity before you decide to ignore it. The fate of your writing could depend on it.

Photo by artsyexistance.

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