After I thought I had finished my last novel, A Few Kinds of Wrong, I went to a retreat with some good friends, who happen to be writers as well. We decided to do some mini-critiques (because that’s how we roll) and I read two parts of my manuscript which I thought were pretty darn good. And then those sections of the MS (not I) got critiqued. Hard. We actually argued and it got to the point that one friend was trying to stop it all because she thought I needed a break. The next morning I had figured out that I needed to scrap the whole book and rewrite it all. A couple of them kindly told me that wasn’t necessary and that I just had to make some key changes and, more importantly, had to figure out why my main character was so messed up. Didn’t matter if that came out in the book or not but I had to know. And so I went through it again and found her motivation and even that of other characters and it made it a soooo much better book. It was a hard lesson to learn but a good one. They wanted to make the book better and their advice did exactly that, once I got past how bad that critique felt. My problem wasn’t what they said, it was the fact that I went into the critique thinking they would tell me how great my pieces were, and they did that too, but now I always receive critiques trying to remember it’s about making the book better.

The other part of making a critique not hurt so much is separating from your book. It is not you. When there are flaws in the work, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are a terrible writer or that there is no hope. Everything can be fixed (at least up until it goes to print) and everything should be fixed. I know it came from you and you chose that word over the other one and you made the character too cookie-cutter or too unrealistic but if you really want to make your work better, you have to separate yourself. When someone you trust, who is kind and honest, looks at your work with a critical eye and tells you where things need to be improved, they are not telling you that you are awful. They are telling you that this particular part of this particular work is not as good as it possibly could be or that they question something about it.

Yes, it may sting a bit, no matter how much you separate from it. My husband is a mechanic and any day where the car he fixed the week before comes back in with a similar problem is a bad day. But he deals in the wonderful world of fixed and not fixed and you, if you’re a writer, live in a subjective world. And you better get used to it because this world is one where your character’s name will make a certain number of your readers angry just because their mean third grade teacher, or rotten boyfriend, or nasty cousin has that name. Your book will never please everyone. NEVER. Put that out of your mind and just make it the best book you can make. All you can do, is take the advice your trusted readers give you and make the best story you can.

And thank them. Trusted readers are so important.

Then take their critiques, haul out the manuscript again, pour yourself some wine to take the sting away a bit, or eat some chocolates or whatever soothes your hurts, and start making it better.

Oh, and if you’re nervous or anxious about your first reader looking at it, this part is terrifying. Because you’re not asking someone to look over a car. You’re asking someone to pick apart something you’ve spent months or years working on. You’re asking them to critically look at the characters you’ve come to love, characters you think of as almost real people. And when they find thing wrongs, it can make you feel bad. And angry. And maybe you, just for a few moments, would like to flatten the tires on their cars and tell them how you never really liked them. But they’ve done you a favour by taking the time to read and analyze your work so you must let that go and never, ever, flatten their tires (if they’re writers and you tell them you never liked them, right after a critique, they’ll understand it’s temporary and move on).

The key is to pick people who your trust AND who will be kind and honest with you.

Now, if you don’t know any writers, that’s okay. You know readers and you know the ones whose opinions you trust, the ones who always seem to recommend the right books to you. If you think you can trust them and they can be honest while being kind, they’ll work out just fine.

If you can find people who accept critique well themselves, and have been critiqued often, then they’re probably going to be good at it. They have figured out how to critique and probably know  the sandwich kind of critique people need, where you layer all the things that don’t work and need to be fixed between two slices of praise at the beginning and end of your critique. Give me that and I’ll be as good as I can be with it.

But how good can you be with it? Now this is the part where you have to try to do the hardest thing when getting your manuscript critiqued or edited. (Later, if you’re good and lucky and don’t give up and get published, you’ll also need to do this when your book gets reviewed.) At this point you have to separate yourself from your work. One of the toughest parts of writing, in my opinion. And the thing that I’ll tell you about it part 3.

Like I said, my husband is always my first reader. I pass him a manuscript when  it’s had about two good drafts: a first draft and then a solid editing and revising to make it a pretty good second draft. Then it’s time for opinions.

I always hand it over with trepidation and even anxiety. It’s hard to know when you’re the only one who’s read it, if the thing is any good or not. Or if it even works as a novel. That’s why others reading your work is imperative. And why you must trust your first readers. I’m also excited to give him the manuscript because now, finally, after such a long time having these people live in your head, someone else knows about them and you can speak about them out loud and someone will know what you’re talking about. You can say “or so Liz would say” and he’ll understand. Or, even better, your first reader will say, “when I saw that on the news, I wondered what Bob (a character) would think about it”. Your characters always seem more real once you share them.

I know other writers who would never let a spouse critique their work and I don’t blame them. It could get pretty nasty if the spouse hated it. I think part of the reason my husband is such a great reader is that he’s not a writer. I look to him not for literary analysis or spell-checking (not that he doesn’t pick up on those things) but for noticing technical details like “that road wasn’t built then” or “a brake job wouldn’t take that long”. He’s good at things like timelines and inconsistencies in characters or setting.

Most of all, my first reader can tell me if it makes sense and if he likes it. In some ways, he is my every reader. He doesn’t edit things professionally or even write and therefore ever have to edit himself. He reads the book as any reader would, but with a slightly more critical eye.

I think he’s my first reader not just because he picks up on all those little things I miss or the fact that he enjoys reading over my manuscripts for me. No, the reason is that I trust him, not just to find those things but to talk to me after he’s finished reading and give me his honest opinion. He is the only person I can get a critique from and not feel a teeny bit defensive or hurt or even angry and crushed. I know that when he tells me something he didn’t like about it or questions a character or something that happened in a plot, it is coming from a place that wants, more than anything, to help me make it better and nothing else. Because not only is he my first reader, he’s my first cheerleader too and no one wants me to do better than he does. If you find a first reader like that, you’re very lucky. Hang onto him or her. They’re invaluable. But other trusted readers are important to have too. And I’ll post about them tomorrow in part 2.

My second goal for TiNoWriMo was writing every day and that has been an epic fail. Completely measurable and for sure I didn’t do it. What else is there to say? Excuses, yeah, I have them but so does everyone and I had way worse get in my way last year during NaNoWriMo and succeeded so excuses don’t matter now.

I hope all the NaNoers out there are doing better than I’ve been doing and, if you’re behind, don’t give up. Now is the time to change your main character’s name to something long and unwieldy. The longest name ever, according to the websites I searched this morning, is Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Jack Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorft Senior. If you really need it to catch up, take it and run. And if people say you’re not playing fair, ask them where their novel is.  Write on!

Last week we were listening to music over supper preparation and eating and I put my new novel’s playlist on shuffle. My husband listened and, after keeping quiet for a while (we’ve had many discussions over my odd and varied tastes in music over the years, some out loud and some said with surly looks at me), he finally said, “what is this?” I told him it was the playlist for Rewriting History and he seemed satisfied with that. A few songs later though, he spoke up again. “Um,. I don’t get this playlist at all. The songs don’t really seem to have anything in common.” I smiled and told him he didn’t understand how I make playlists.

As I’ve explained here before, I often write internally, frequently while on a treadmill or elliptical machine while listening to music. Many scenes, and almost all pivotal scenes, have a song or two associated with them, almost a music video that I can picture while I listen. But some songs on a playlist are more about a mood. They are sad and I can feel my character being sad through them, even if the lyrics don’t match a scene. Or they are upbeat and I can think of my character driving too fast while listening to them on a sunny day. Rewriting History has three main characters and the story is told through each of them so the Rewriting History soundtrack also includes songs I think each of them would like. Since the main characters are quite a bit older than me, they are not necessarily the songs I’d like but I think I can imagine my characters listening to them so that lets me understand them more. So, you can see how listening to a playlist that includes The All-American Rejects, Kris Kristofferson, Cher, the Tragically Hip, the Dixie Chicks, The Killers, and Billy Idol, (to name a few) might be confusing to my husband but for me, and for the people who live inside Rewriting History, it makes perfect sense. I just wish one of them didn’t like the Beatles so much. Maybe she’ll force me to become a fan yet if I listen to them enough. Maybe you will find that creating a playlist like this for your writing will help bring your characters new life.

But it’s just a matter of getting back in the habit and I will definitely be blogging more because I have something to procrastinate and you know that writing blog posts is one of my favourite forms of procrastination. Much, much better than procrastinating by cleaning the toilet or deciding to gut out the toy box (which I just did). So what, you may ask, do I have to procrastinate? Well, I’m very pleased to say that the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council has kindly given me another grant. This time it’s for a new novel tentatively called Rewriting History (see, that’s where the title of this post comes from–I knew you were wondering).  And it’s not that I’m not enjoying writing this book. You know that. I just procrastinate the writing. Like if I let it stew longer and wait to put pen to paper, it will come out in a great flood of words, easy as rolling balls down a hill. And it does.

This new book is as much fun as I’ve had writing. There are three main characters whose lives are entangled in complicated and not nice ways. It is full of black humour so far and that will continue. But that’s about all I’m willing to say about it now. I hate talking about things like that when they’re new which is one of the disadvantages of applying for grants. In order to apply, you have to tell the Arts Council about your project and even include a writing sample, preferably from the book you want to write. You have to think ahead a bit and figure out what the book will be about. And I like to just have an idea and then see where the idea takes me. No plotting or mapping or anything. But I looked ahead, saw, in broad strokes, where the book would be going and worked hard on a writing sample. And now I have something to procrastinate.

I am also, perhaps as another form of procrastination, still revising my mystery/thriller novel which I first finished in 1997 and needed a good overhaul. And now is the time. It’s just one of those books that I had to hone the craft of writing a bit before I could go back and make it what it needs to be. But it’s very different, in tone and content than anything I’ve had published or the other book I’m writing so it’s an excellent form of procrastination for me.

So, that’s what I’m doing and that’s what I will be doing for the next while. And wrangling Ben, who really requires complete wrangling concentration (I had to stop writing this post so I could get him out of a dangerous situation AKA he was standing on his tippy toes on the edge of a chair saying “tada”). And helping Sam with homework, swimming , Tae Kwon Do and all the many other parts of his life. And  all the other stuff that I can either procrastinate or use as a form of procrastination, depending on the day and the mood. Like laundry. That’s measurable and I can definitely tell you I’m procrastinating that. Oh, and I’m reading an amazingly fantastic book but I’ll tell you about that on another day. For now, I have to go wrangle and procrastinate something. The one consistency in life is that there’s always something to do and always something to put off doing.

So I took the book my husband had kindly bought for me and put it away, feeling a bit lesser for owning a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. But, as is often the case, my close-minded opinions are usually turned around to show me how wrong I can be and such was the case when I needed a book to read in the bath and there, in the pile was Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. I was in the mood to read about writing so I picked it up. And I enjoyed the stories. But there was one in particular that changed things for me. Me, who at the time, had two novels completed and safely in a drawer, another two well on the way to getting finished and portions of more in boxes and drawers and shelves all over the place. Me, who had never tried to get any of them published. I read the story of Dierdre W. Honnold and her mother. Honnold’s mother wanted to write her own story, a novel, and it would sell big and they would be rich and famous, at least that’s what she kept telling her children. But as she got older, Honnold began to get impatient with her mother because she knew that in order to be a writer, you had to write. Talking about it wouldn’t do the trick. When her mother died, on a snowy night surrounded by family, Honnold wrote, “her book died too”. Her mother never followed her own dream to write that novel, and this inspired Honnold to write and to ensure that her children could read their mother’s stories.

So, there I was in the bathtub, tears rolling down my face as I read, and while some of my stories were no longer inside me, they’d made it onto the page, but they weren’t doing much in my drawer. And I was doing nothing to get them out in the universe. I knew that I didn’t want the little napping baby in the next room to ever think I had let the things I wanted to do, craved to do, die with me. And I started to write more and work harder on stories I liked. When my friend Kathy called me, later that year, to tell me I should pitch one of my books at the Pitch to the Publisher event at the Word on the Rock Literary Festival, I at first dismissed it outright. The thought terrified me. But Honnold’s story about her mom had stuck with me and inspired me to actually do it. The idea of my child not knowing my stories or that I’d even tried to follow my dream of having them published made me draft a pitch. And although threats from Kathy and my friend Pam to physically drag me to the Pitch to the Publisher were very inspriring and immediate, down deep the thoughts of having my books die with me someday, having never tried, was the real impetus to stand in front of four publishers and tell them about a partially finished novel called this much is true.

So, with book number two out there now, my youngest child points and says “Mama” when he sees the cover of A Few Kinds of Wrong. At almost two years old, he knows now, even before he has the words to understand it, that this is my story I wrote. And recently at school, that baby who’d been napping when I first read Honnold’s inspiring story, had a chance, during literacy week at his school, to write the name of his favourite author on a big piece of paper in the school hall. Two teachers–one who didn’t know me or Sam–contacted me to tell me how this sweet, six-year-old boy wrote “Tina Chaulk” on the wall.

So, don’t let your story, or the painting you’ve been dreaming of trying, or the poem you imagine writing for your child, die when you do. I really do know how easy it is to procrastinate, and I certainly know how hard and scary it is to try, but isn’t it scarier to have your story or your painting or whatever it is you want to do or create, die still inside of you? It was to me. I hope the idea gives you a kick in the pants to get going on your dream. Or maybe you’ve set about doing it already. If you have, what has inspired you to follow your dreams?