You'll shoot your eye out

When my wife and I lived in Columbia, SC, I attended my first writers critique group. I saw an ad for the South Carolina Writers Workshop in Writers Digest and found a local group that met twice a month. I found one of my finest pieces of fiction, the first chapter of a book I still might return to someday, and headed to my first meeting with several copies for the group to critique. Someone who I met that night and am still friends with told me if I wanted to get any benefit from a crit group I had to check my ego at the door. How true. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, I expected everyone to adore my fiction and tell me how great it was.

But like Ralphie, I got “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Sort of. I was dismayed to see all of the marks and questions on the papers as I glanced at them after the meeting, but then studied them more carefully later on. The suggestions and questions made me think more about the chapter, and subsequent revisions made it read smoother with more clarity. By the time I’d been to a few sessions, I decided I’d never submit any fiction, long or short, anywhere without first letting a few people look at it and rip it apart, if need be, so I could put it back together and make it better. To this day I hold to that belief. I don’t think I’ve ever used every suggestion others have made, but I always use some (or most) of them. If one person points something out, I think about it. If several people point out the same thing, I look at it very hard and usually make changes.

Even pros run their work through editors. I’ve heard one famous author refuses to let anyone edit her work, and subsequently through the years one of the comments about her is that all of her books sound the same. Specific critiques can be a writer’s best friend, especially when they come from people who will be honest, hopefully in a diplomatic way (“here are a few things you might want to revise” sounds better than “this sucks”). And general critiques don’t do much good (“I didn’t get the overall tone”), while specific comments (“when your main character lashes out against his girlfriend it goes against everything you showed us about him earlier”) can make the story more believable.

So yes, if you show your fiction to others and ask for their opinions, check your ego at the door. I’m still friends with several members of that first critique group and always enjoy hearing from them. After our twice-monthly meetings we always went out to eat and discussed writing and life for a couple of hours. Those after-meeting meetings were some of the best times I’ve ever had. Some of the group members – C. Hope Clark and Elizabeth Boyce, perhaps others as well – now have contracts with traditional publishers (as opposed to self-publishing, which is another subject altogether).

So if you want your writing to improve, let a few others see it if they can give helpful advice. Try to find a local writers group or even an online group.

My exception to this rule is my blog posts. Hopefully I won’t shoot my eye out.

Grisham, Tolkien, and King

A little more background.

For about twenty years I hardly ever read any fiction. That’s something I wish I could change. For the last fifteen years I’ve read almost nothing but fiction. The first novel I read after the long drought was John Grisham’s “The Runaway Jury.” Grisham is still one of my favorite authors and I’m currently reading his book “The Street Lawyer.” My wider adventure into fiction continued with Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, also still on my favorites list.

As I started writing more, I always picked up Writers Digest as it hit the newsstands. One month they had an article by Stephen King, actually I think it was an excerpt, from his then-new book “On Writing.” I’d never ready anything by him since I didn’t read horror. You too? That’s okay. If you enjoyed the movies “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” or “Stand by Me,” you like King’s work. Anyway, the article/excerpt in Writers Digest made me sufficiently curious to get “On Writing.” Seems like my wife bought it for me. I won’t give a full review of it, but it showed me King wasn’t the boogie man, and he had a lot of great, simple thoughts about writing. Since then he’s been my favorite author and I’ve read many of his books. I recommend it for anyone who writes or thinks they might like to write.

A few years into writing and reading fiction, I saw (as everybody and his momma did) the first Lord of the Rings movie. As it drew to a close, I was thinking Frodo and Sam were going to have to get the ring to Mordor pretty quickly, then the movie ended. I didn’t know it was slated to be a trilogy of movies or that it was a trilogy of books. I asked around and started reading “The Hobbit” a few days later, then got “Lord of the Rings” and read it twice – once before the second movie, and once after. Some of my friends in high school read the books and discussed them a good bit, and as I read them for the first time I wished I would’ve picked up Tolkien as a teenager instead of waiting until I was in my forties.

My early stories were short. I think that’s the way most writers start their craft. As I wrote more, the stories got longer. I now have first drafts of five novels, ranging from 50,000 to 80,000 words, which would translate into maybe 225 to 375 pages. I’m in an online critique group that’s helped me tremendously and hope to have one of the novels ready to send to prospective agents and publishers by the end of this year (2014). This part of the process can be hard work, but it’s still fun.

Every writer has a different story of how they got where they are on their writing journey. This is just a few snippets of mine. What’s yours?

Why do I write?

I kept a blog about my writing a while back and decided to start a new one instead of adding to one that hasn’t been added to since 2009. Feel free to look at it if you’re bored or curious. It’s at http://dwsurrettwriting.blogspot.com/. Since that time I’d like to think my writing has gotten at least a little better, and I’ve been through some life circumstances that help me see some things differently.

I’ll take this first post to give a little background. I got interested in writing fiction when I was in my mid-thirties. Ancient for a lot of writers. I read a few copies of Writers Digest and took a course from Long Ridge Writers Group, which helped me with a lot of the basics. It wasn’t essential, but was beneficial and I’ve never been sorry I took it. http://longridgewritersgroup.com/index_wc.htm. My final assignment for Long Ridge was published in a small magazine that unfortunately no longer exists. I’ve had a few short stories published in other small magazines, anthologies, and an online publication. So no, I haven’t hit the big time yet.

So why do I take time to write when I could be doing other things? Because I enjoy it. Simple as that. I have hopes of publishing novels someday, but even without that chance, I’d still write. It gives me a creative outlet I didn’t know I needed until the writing bug bit me. With a stressful job that helps pay the bills, the last thing I want to do with my evenings is anything that’s gonna add more stress. Life is stressful enough without having a hobby that just seems like another job, even though writing can be hard work if you want to progress. But more about that in a future post.

Anytime anyone says they like to write, or even think they might like to write, I encourage them to go for it. Use your imagination. Write without caring what anybody else thinks. If you never want anyone else to see your work, that’s fine. Just keep writing. If you write for yourself, you don’t have to worry about what anybody else thinks. When (or if) you want someone to read what you’ve written, don’t let their response deflate you too badly or make your head swell too much. You’re in it for fun and your own satisfaction. If that never reaches to anyone else, so be it.

I’ll end this post with advice from Stephen King, who happens to be my favorite writer. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” And get King’s book “On Writing.”

Keep reading, and keep writing. Be creative. Be yourself.