Take care when shaving
Becoming the reader of your writing
Thanks to the wonderful Society of Authors, I have been spending several happy hours on Zoom, engaging in workshops run under the umbrella of Professional Development.
Let’s just pause there for a moment. While I have been a writer and editor pretty much all of my adult life, and would even, when challenged, call myself a professional writer, I have never, paradoxically, thought of writing as a profession. Accountancy, yes. Anaesthesiology, certainly. Architecture, to be sure. But writing? Where were the exams you needed to pass, and the qualifications you needed to accrue? What were the letters you could put after your name? To try and clarify the source of my unease, I hefted out from the bookshelf Volume XII (Poise-Quelt) of my much-treasured Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, nestling there, in paragraph III 6 under the heading profession was what I was looking for:
“ The occupation which one professes to be skilled in and to follow. a. A vocation in which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used in its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of an art founded upon it. Applied spec. to the three learned professions of divinity, law and medicine; also of the military profession.”
So it seems to boil down to asserting you’re good at something, unless you’re a soldier, a cleric, a barrister or a doctor, in which case you are assumed to be good at something. OK, I am happy to profess that my occupation is being a writer. Whether I am skilled at it is for others to judge - or is it? Surely you need to be able to assess your own writing? This is something I will come back to in a moment. For now, though, back to the Society of Authors and Professional Development.
The two workshops I found particularly helpful were one on writing a synopsis, and a second delightfully named Book Marketing for Introspectives. The guidance for writing a good synopsis was especially chastening. The workshop required an actual finished book to work on, and so I selected the novel Formerly Known As Small Deaths, or FKA as I now call it. What became startlingly clear is that there are lacunae, oversights and awkwardnesses in the novel as it stands which urgently need addressing - so that is what I am doing now. Book Marketing for Introspectives, run by the charming and impressive Anna Caig,1 also raised some thorny questions around what you share with your readers, how and where. I was particularly struck by the author who shared a passion for seaweed. Fascinating.
The third element in this autumnal drive for self-improvement - no, not actually self-improvement, but improvement of my skills as a writer (my self is probably best left to its own devices) - was joining a new Critique Group, again through the Society of Authors. There are four of us, all very different writers, but with a common goal of making our writing better. We have only just begun, but even now the process has thrown up some interesting findings. The same passage (from FKA) has drawn three markedly different responses from these three readers. They have each made perceptive and helpful comments, but they have also each valued very different aspects of what I had written. So where do I go from here?
I needed, I realised, to become the reader of my own writing. This is clearly going to be an ongoing process, but I thought I would start by having a look at what some notable writers have said about what makes good writing (thank you Jericho Writers for the compilation2).
These are three statements I have taken to heart:
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” Mark Twain
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov
“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” Roald Dahl
Three very different writers - three invaluable pieces of advice. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how my agent will respond to my application of Mark Twain’s guidance.
I’d like to finish by bringing to mind A.E. Housman’s remark on his reaction to good poetry:
“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” A.E. Housman
Definitely something to watch out for when shaving of a morning…
Find out more about her at AnnaCaigComms.co.uk.
I really do love the random slices of advice we get from authors. While even some of them might not claim to be "professionals," they often have some practical advice to hand off and for that, I am eternally grateful. I do struggle with one bit of advice, however... While I understand "showing" the moon shining is a lot better than "telling," if I had just spent four paragraphs describing what a 10-degree Celsius evening feels like surrounded by a colony of flying fruit bats, I think using the one line of "the moon is shining" might be OK. It's knowing when to show and when to tell that often trips me up.