There Is NO Safety Net

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, we’ve been talking about writers going solo and working without a net.  So far so good.  Writers can subcontract editing.  They can subcontract proofing. They can subcontract art and even document conversion.

Can they subcontract confidence?

What am I talking about, you say?  Well, I’ll be blunt.  First let me start with the fact that writers’ belief in their abilities and their abilities are often totally at odds with each other.  And rarely the way you’d expect.

Very few writers who suck on ice will believe they are the world’s gift to writing.  Oh, sure, there are a few, but those have usually got that way because of “critical acclaim” – also, they’re not usually bad as such.  They might not be to my – or your taste – but they are decent of their kind.

No, writers – absent a few strange wanna bes – after their earliest steps when everyone thinks their stuff is great because they don’t know enough to know it sucks, are alone among the creative professions by thinking, most of the time, that their stuff sucks.

I don’t know why.  Perhaps it is that we use words, which is what everyone uses to speak, normally.  So… how do you judge “good”.

Well, good is what holds your attention.  But you find out early on what holds your attention is not necessarily what holds other’s.  Besides, you have a vested interest in this world.  Otherwise you’d never have written it, right?

And then by the time you’re minimally published, you will know that people can find stuff in your books you never meant to put in.  I’ve been accused of everything and WORSE praised for things that I not only can’t see in my books but hope to heaven aren’t there.

So you get odd.  You start wondering what is there, and … is it any good?

For years, while I was unpublished, I used my writers’ group as my touchstone.  “Is it good, guys?  Is it good?”  Yeah, they were newbies too, but they lived outside my head.  And if they liked it… well… maybe other people would.

I confess for the last… five? Years I’ve used my agent mostly as a touch stone.  If the agent approved of it, well, she must know what’s marketable, right?  Even if it wasn’t true, it was encouragement…

So, now I’m agentless.  I’m putting a lot of my stuff up myself.  What sells is flabbergasting me, as it’s often my earliest, clumsiest work, or that with a really weird bend (Think back to the Muppets and HEAR this with the right voice “Nuuuuuns in SPACE!) Mind you I haven’t put up the juvenalia and won’t put that under my own name BUT well…  When you finish something… how do you know it’s good?

This has come home to me today because having finished A Few Good Men I’m trying not to rush the betas and ask how it reads and… do they think it will find an audience?  I really have no clue.  I see all the clumsy spots under a magnifying glass and I worry it sucks.

At the same time my older son and a friend who also finished work are convinced THEIRS sucks.  So… It’s like this – my husband has read son’s and says it’s quite good (And no, he’s not easy on us.  So likely he’s right.)

How do you know it’s good?

Well… first, accept you’re the worst judge of your own work.  It’s possible to gain perspective on it, sure.  First, forget you wrote it.  Then let it sit for ten years.

Oh, you don’t HAVE ten years?  Then accept.  You don’t KNOW if it’s good.  You just don’t.

Second – find ten friends.  Give manuscript to ten friends.  IF more than three find the same problem, you have an issue.  If not, ignore it.  And pay attention to the “general” feel.  Like “I couldn’t put it down.”  Or “You sent me that?  Are you sure?”  Or “Uh, it was great till chapter twenty.”  Or… if everyone is saying that (you’ll ALWAYS get a couple of those, but) or if eight people are saying one of those, then that gives you an idea where the book stands.

Third – Kris Rusch tells me after a certain level a writer is at a certain level.  Yes, I know “Oh, thank you, oh, great Sybil.  We bow before your knowledge.”  I find – though I had trouble believing it – it’s by and large true.  If you’ve written more than one “decent” story, by whatever means, chances are all of your stories are decent to an extent.  I.e. you’re not pulling beginning idiocy.  BUT… is it good?

Well, this defaults to:

Fourth – Alma Alexander told me at a con that everything you write will be someone’s favorite and someone’s most hated of your works.  This is very freeing.  Let it out.

Fifth – will it sell?  Oh, who knows?  I don’t know.  So, put it out and see.  It might shock you.  (nuuuuns.  In space!)

Sixth – You’re working without a net.  You can learn what sells, given time.  You can learn what’s good – to you at least – by reading your favorite writers and analyzing what they do.  You can have sense of where you stand – ask ten friends you trust – but in the end, you’re working without a net.

Are you going to do it?  Or are you going to go back and hide in the shadows, your words unread, your worlds unshared?

Which is it going to be?

You want to be a writer, do you?  There’s the tightrope.  Get up there and DANCE.

 

Update: As for check the statistics on what sells.  Well, I have 19 back list short stories out, so I just went and looked.  Yep.  Dragon’s Blood and With Unconfined Wings (a short about gun-packing sisters of St. Lucia of the Spaceways in a far frontier colony) are still outselling everything else by an unreal margin.  Does this mean I finally get to/will be forced to write Her Crown of Stars, Her Trusty Burner?

58 thoughts on “There Is NO Safety Net”

  2. Tell me about it.

    I’ve commented in the Keller that the day I finish writing something that I really think is good is probably the day I need to hang it up. I’ve never been happy with my own writing (though I admit to being happy with the degree I PO the left).

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    1. I spent years trying to get people I was mentoring to send more stuff out and getting back “but it’s not good.” I kept going “Just send it out. You can’t judge your own writing.” And telling them I LIVED on that ledge of self-doubt. None of them believed it. They seem to think once a publisher buys your book you’re magical and know what you write is gold (rolls eyes.) I wonder — I do — how that will affect self-publishing which has become a necessity for me in non sf areas. Not that I’ve been fired, mind, but I just can’t live with some stuff anymore. So, I’m solo-ing it. And I wonder how many people will still NOT publish because “but it’s not good”.

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  3. Sarah, I don’t spend a lot of time reading author’s blogs. But I do read yours. Not only do I find your blog entertaining, but you are so often to the point in what you say and how you say it that I am more than a bit jealous.
    I started to send out query letters to agents while my first novel was still in editing. I got some rejection letters back from a few agents but most never bothered to reply. Since I was at the time closing in on my 60th year I made the decision to self-publish and I have never regretted that. Working without a safety net is scary – it puts all of the responsibility for my success or failure right where it belongs; on me. And I like that. I’ve got 3 novels out now, and I’m near the end of writing my fourth. While the numbers are low, the comments from readers (and the royalty checks from Amazon and B&N) are very encouraging. Being able to write well is one thing; being able to market and sell a product is quite another, isn’t it? Self confidence ain’t in it, Sarah. You do what you have to do to ensure that folks buy your product instead of the next author’s books. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but my bank manager is the father.

    Keep writing, Sarah. I really enjoy what you have to say.

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  4. There is a safety net. It’s called “statistics”, and it’s the best feature of self-publishing.

    “Standard deviation” (a.k.a. “sigma”) is a measure of weirdness. A little over two-thirds of the population is between -1 and +1 standard deviation. That’s “normal”. On the other hand, four standard deviations away from “normal” there are only 32 per million who are that weird. On the gripping hand, there are 7 billion people on the planet; a little fewer than a billion speak English, and 300 million of them live in the United States. That means there’s right at ten thousand people in the US who are four-sigma weird, and thirty thousand English speakers in general who are so afflicted.

    It’s extremely unlikely you’re four-sigma strange, because that takes real effort, bizarre influences, or (more usually) both — in writing terms, at four sigma you’re in “goat that rules the planet written in illiterate prose” territory. But even if you are, there are still ten thousand Americans and roughly three times that many Anglospherians who’ll like what you do and want more. That’s your safety net, and Amazon et. al. will let you find it. Traditional publishing won’t, because the editor who’s your real market isn’t one of that thirty-two out of a million.

    “Will anybody like it?” is a dumb question. There’s somebody out there who’ll like anything. The question is “are there enough people who’ll like it to make a living?” The only way to answer that is to put it out there and let Nature take its course. Once you’ve seen the result you can adjust to accommodate in the next try — maybe it isn’t a real goat, just somebody who smells bad and says “Bah!” to everything, and you can spell a few of the words correctly. If you can dial it back to three sigma of weird, you have almost five million potential customers in the United States alone (and now you know how Ron Popeil made a living). Of course, at four sigma you also have to deal with the 999,968 per million who don’t like it — but that’s easy; you just shrug and say, “Ah, too bad, not one of my people. Maybe next time.”

    Regards,
    Ric

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    1. You are, of course, right, but I was talking of the internal “is this cr*p?* feel not actual sales. It’s… psychological (yes, and therefore stupid.)

      As for deviation I’m so not going there. Let’s just say I don’t like goats. :)

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      1. Absolutely true, of course, but what I’m trying for here is to express my own method of coping and recommend it to you. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, somebody will like it; for that minority it isn’t cr*p, it’s great. What you have to do is say of the critics, “well, they weren’t who I intended it for in the first place, but now that I know what they want, next time maybe I can appeal to them.” If you think “this is crap” and never put it out there you’ve confirmed your own prejudice, and you’ll get your intestines in a knot — as SF writers you and I are both at least one bubble off plumb, which means that over two-thirds of people won’t like our stuff anyway.. If you go ahead and put it out, you’ll get at least some positive feedback: Joel J. “Weasel” Hartmann of West Skokie, Illinois liked it, and if you trim the next one a bit maybe you can rope in his buddy “Skag” Wizniewski, too.

        It’s a version of “sour grapes”, of course. My point is that “sour grapes” is good for the fox’s health and well-being :-)

        Regards,
        Ric

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      2. Thanks Ric!

        Now I want to hear a story about a goat and the “Weasel” (with his trusty sidekick Snag of course!) fighting for world domination!

        Who’s up for that one? Sarah? Ric? Anyone?

        Guess I have to write it myself. (Sigh. By which I really mean: Cool!!)

        This is also why the “write what you like” advice is so good. You are the only demographic you can ever truly know. And, as Ric points out, unless you’re a weirdo, you are probably a good indicator of the market, AND, even if you are a weirdo, there are plenty of weirdos out there like you to sell too.

        Also, I have to say something. I think this is all BS. I really do not think writers’ think their stuff is crap. This is all just false modesty really.

        To be perfectly honest, I think my stuff is pretty darn good, even though I’ve said it’s crap, even on this forum. Can it be improved, sure it can, what can’t? but if I didn’t think I had a knack for it, I would have quit. All this “It isn’t very good” stuff isn’t lack of confidence, it’s false modesty and we all know it. We all feel hot in the face when someone criticizes our work and it takes time to cool down and take the advice, digest it and assimilate it rationally. But if we really felt our work was no good, that first flush of anger, that I know ALL writer’s feel, wouldn’t happen. We like our stuff. Heck, we LOVE our stuff, and we want others to love it too. False modesty is the Trojan horse we all use (and this isn’t just writer’s, it’s true of everything from politicians to grandmother’s cookies) to get it under our audience’s defenses. It’s goal is to elicit sympathy and express a desire for contrition and communion. It is the “Does this dress make me look fat?” of writing. And just like the “Does this dress make me look fat?” question, the author isn’t looking for real hard criticism, but for affirmation. If we answer the fat question honestly, we are going to be sleeping on the couch. What the person wants is affirmation that, if they aren’t perfect, they are at least acceptable and should continue on their given track.

        Now IMO false modesty is good, because it insulates us from instant rejection and it eases tensions and maintains polite fictions. These gray areas allow us fudge room that makes us all more comfortable. Language is not about clarity or communication. It is about creating these nebulous spaces where we can keep open many multivalent possibilities, maintain plausible deniability and open ourselves carefully to introspection. ( I love Steven Pinker’s work on this BTW. ) Saying “It isn’t very good” of your own stuff is a lie. What you really mean, is “I like it very much and think it’s good, but I am looking for outside confirmation and validation in a comfortable non-threatening way, that may include constructive criticism but not outright repudiation.” IOW – “Are you an ally or not?” Are you a person that is going to help me with this dream or are you just going to spitefully shut me down. And that’s a very important thing to find out, in life and in writing.

        Writers are hard on themselves true, but that is the mark of any serious professional, but they don’t really think their stuff is crap. People who really think their stuff is crap quit and move on. It was clear to me early on, I had no career or future in athletics, I hated it, I sucked at it, I quit. We tend to do the things we like and that we do well. Even the most ardent dreamer who wants to be an NFL star or a Rock star will eventually get the message and move on. We strive because we know we have a shot, though we couch it in self-criticism, we know we are good, and that we might be great someday.My wife is a competent writer, but it’s a serious effort for her and she doesn’t enjoy it, so she didn’t continue to write past what was required in college. The rest of us didn’t. We like it and we are better than average at it.

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          1. Yes and no? The novel planned is bizarre as St. Lucia (this St. Lucia) is a bioed joy-girl who goes on a fight against slavers/space pirates, and a quest for her soul (if she has one) and interspersed with it would be stand alone stories about the nuns in the order she funds. And btw, not only doesn’t this family have an obsession with nuns, I don’t think we KNOW any nuns. So it’s weird.

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        2. You’re dead wrong. Most writers DO think their stuff is crap. I know how hard I fought my fledgelings to “just send it out” even with me assuring them it was good. So… And I — as I said — see all the places stuck together with duct tape and spit. Doesn’t help that one of my betas is enough like me he sees them too… though it does help, in a way, because by now I know how to fix them.

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          1. I disagree completely. Subconsciously, we like our work and we like ourselves. You (and I’m speaking in the rhetorical “you” not you Sarah Hoyt personally) know you like it. You worry about whether it will be accepted, just like you worry whether you your person will be accepted by others in social settings. But we don’t really think the problem is with us, we think the problem is with them, though we couch these as feelings of inferiority, we really don’t hate ourselves. It’s been my experience that very few people genuinely have inferior complexes. Quite the opposite frankly. Given the opportunity, and unlimited adulation, we all become raging megalomaniacs. We think too much of ourselves, not too little. Those people who are successful often are more introspective and open to change and criticism, but that’s not the same as latent inferiority. People with true inferiority problems are aggressively self-defensive. Being open to criticism is evidence of a good center and certain knowledge about what your real skills are.

            Of course, there is no way to open up a person’s soul and prove this, though there are a few studies that suggest that people instinctively act defensively and selfishly and always see the problem in other people’s lack of acceptance, not their lacking, but then, we’ve had this battle before. I’m very much convinced by the new Psychology and I don’t think anyone here is, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

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  5. There is, indeed, no safety net. Those of us who’ve believed there was a net under us while we wobbled on the highwire — we were misguided. The agent, the acquisitions editor, the publisher — we thought they were the safety net, and they weren’t and aren’t.

    Granted, some slack must be cut for us who believed the net was there, due simply to the fact that everyone else told us it was. “But these are writers with so much more experience! They must be right!” As the Emperor was naked, the net was made of gossamer if it existed at all. I don’t see any net anymore.

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  7. Oh my, Sarah ….
    I scrolled through your shorts and the first one I bought was … you betcha … “St. Lucia of the Spaceways”.
    So yes. Nuns in Space — go for it!

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    1. I dropped by to see the new comments in this thread and noticed my mistake. Of course it was “With Unconfined Wings” that I bought (and read, and quite enjoyed), not “St. Lucia of the Spaceways”.
      But, dear Sarah, my request remains … Nuns in Space! Yeah!

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      1. Sigh. Will it wait till January? I’ll put a free one up today, but I only have THOSE TWO. I’ll have to wait till Jan, and then I can start doing five-packets of nuns in space…

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        1. Oh of course; didn’t really mean to be pushy. Just being perhaps excessively enthusiastic. Please work on whatever you want to — and take time to live a life too. To borrow a Pournelle saying, I know you are “dancing as fast as you can”.

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  8. Thanks for this post. Unless something unexpected happens, I should hit the 50k mark today on my NaNoWriMo novel, not that the book will be done. It’s probably going to clock in at about 70k. But for the last day or two I’ve been wondering if it will be good enough to put out there. Thanks for the boot to the head to get me thinking straight again.

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  9. You know, I found the same thing in the news writing end. I’m NEVER happy with what I write. I do remember when I finally started to get that I was good (for certain values of good) at this. I was still a lowly college student and I’d written my first front page piece for a real daily newspaper.

    One of the other reporters complimented me on it and I started to complain about the places I thought it could have been better and she lit me up about not taking a compliment.

    Somewhere in there it clicked, people don’t compliment bad work. Still, I hate most of the stuff I write, usually think I did a sloppy lazy job and can’t understand why anyone pays me to write.

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    1. You are not alone in that, Patrick. But it’s not up to us to decide if what we write is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Our readers are the only ones qualified to make that judgement, so leave it in their very capable hands and get on with your writing.

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      1. Oh I’m happy enough to leave it to them to decide. I don’t understand why people pay me to write, but I’ll keep taking their money lol.

        My mentor told me once, the fact that I never think I worked hard enough on a story is a sign that I’m good at what I do.

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        1. He’s probably correct. On the other hand, I have to sweat over every line and phrase. I don’t specially like writing for a living – I’m way too lazy. But I do enjoy plotting and character development, which is very handy since I do have to write for my bread and butter.

          Your work has to be good enough to sell; meaning that the people who put eyes on your books will see enough value to them in your writing that they will pay hard-earned money for the promise that book holds for them.

          Our job as writers is to do whatever is necessary to ensure we do not disappoint them. You last book(s) sell your next.

          All the best to you and yours Patrick!

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  10. The real problem is we are comparing what we actually write with the glorious story in our heads, and of course it looks bad by comparison (Mine has an original Goldsmith soundtrack and illuminated drop-cap letters and witty repartee, how about you?)

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      1. Wow. Am I ever deprived in the audio/visual department. But I do get involved in ‘seeing’ my descriptions of places and events in my stories, and I do develop a pretty good relationship with my characters, which makes writing about them a whole lot easier. But no bells or whistles (unless they have to be in the story), and no sound tracks, I am sad to say.

        I’ll have to work on that one.

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    2. Mine is written in thousand foot high letters on diamond cliffs overlooking a bioluminescent seashore on a planet in a trinary system in a resplendent star nursery. It was carved there by creatures who have no idea why they did it, it was just written into their dna by their creators and they will build spaceships and travel to new planets and carve it again on endless worlds.

      Not that I have an ego or anything.

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  11. I write non-fiction and find that I’m really postive about my stuff when I start it – I’m just sure it is going to help people. Somewhere in the middle I’m sure it’s a hopeless, muddled mess (and it likely is) and that it’ll never be any good (likely wrong). Finally, after I’ve worked on it till I’m sick of it, I’m ok with it and even think it may be pretty useful, but I’m always aware of all the ways in which I wish it would be better. I do have an editor for the book I’m working on now and she demands that I NOT go back and re-work chapters until I’ve got a first draft of the whole book. She’s right, but…

    I once had to write a paper suggesting candidates for the 25th Character Strength (see viacharacter.org). One of my classmates, an executive coach, suggested “Get It Out the Door.” She made a good case for it. For some writers a coach might help, maybe especially with non-writing parts like pulling the trigger on getting it out and taking regular, systematic steps to market.

    Sarah, I enjoy your work and your posts. Thanks. Good luck!

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  12. “are alone among the creative professions by thinking, most of the time, that their stuff sucks.”

    Um…except for artists, sculptors, musicians, ad people, speech writers, dancers, performers of all stripes, jugglers, athletes, accordion players, businessmen (and yes business is a creative endeavor)…the list is endless. All creative people are needlessly harsh on themselves. It’s part of the creative drive to succeed, but to never be satisfied. There’s a dissertation in there somewhere…OH! Add grad students to the list too.

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  13. FWIW, to hear from an as-yet-unpublished noob, what I’m working on NOW is a ten-year-old first draft that I have looked at periodically, thinking like a mantra “This is crap. This is crap.” I finally took an attempted unbiased looked, thinking, “Let’s see what we can mine out of this crap,” and wound up going… “Hey! This is pretty good! Who wrote this!”

    So the ten-year thing is valid IFF you can muster the patience.

    M

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    1. Yes, but I want it to be out and selling before that. Also, frankly, after ten years, if it isn’t good, you see the parts that aren’t good. CLEARLY. I have that with a space-opera I stuck on.

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  14. the really good people in any field don’t really think that they are that good, they just can’t figure out why everyone else around them is so bad

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    1. Dunno ’bout that, David. I happen to be fortunate enough to be at/near the top of the heap in a different venue (not writing). I look around at my “peers” and wonder what I can steal from them that’s good. I’m aware of my shortcomings, but also how to work around them and still deliver saleable work. I can SEE when the “crap” is “good enough” and work on improving it. For some reason, that’s different in writing.

      M

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      1. Mark,
        You develop the same sort of eye for it, after a while. Lately I’ve been reading romances (can’t read what I’m writing) and making notes on squandered characters I can steal. Actually did the same with C J Cherryh’s Russalka, though I haven’t used THAT one yet. But your own stuff is still hard to judge.

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  15. Yeah. I’ve also thought a LOT about the truism that you have to do something 9,000 or 10,000 times to get really good at it. I do that much work, sometimes, in a year, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Considering the amount of time it takes to write a “time” or a “do”, how can anybody EVER get really good at writing? Or, is 9,000 hours putting words down enough?

    I could use Czernevog (sic) as a model for How to do Evil.

    M

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    1. This is where writing short stories REALLY helps. For a time I made myself write a short story a weekend. Some were PAINFULLY bad, but most were at least passable, after a while. Also, they got me writing faster and taught me “story awareness” It’s another thing I can’t convince my fledgelings of, but having written about 36 novels and 200+ short stories, means you only get faster.

      I can write a post (tomorrow) on “Writing fast while writing well” if anyone is interested?

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      1. I wrote my first three novels many years ago. I am happy to report that they never saw the light of day. But I wrote them in longhand, with a pencil. that taught me to economize on the words I put down on paper and how I structured my sentences. You could say that I learned the mechanics of writing well the hard way.

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      2. Heh, we have that “Writing fast while writing well (or at least passably)” down to an art form in the newspaper business. It’s called brutal deadlines and mean editors standing over you tapping their foot and checking their watch every five seconds. It’s amazing how motivating that is.

        What always stuns me about it, is some of my best work has been done 30 minutes before deadline with a breaking story. Something about the prospect of hanging, etc., etc. I think.

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        1. Yes, but novels are different, and you can get your subconscious to shut up because of excessive pressure. But you do need discipline (picture me, my dears, in thigh high boots, mini-skirt and leather bustier. You’re welcome!) and mind-tricks as well as work flow tricks, and those I KNOW.

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        2. I feel your pain Patrick. We in the tech writing world face similar hard deadlines. Got to deliver by day X so the international translations can be done prior to product launch. … but … but… those pesky engineers keep changing the product. Arrraaagga!
          (Sorry, had to vent. I’m up against one of those deadlines today. Now, back to work…. )

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  16. La-ti-dah … several ruminations on a topic that is looking pretty well chewed over already. As if thet evuh deterred me.

    1. Good does not matter. You can write good — heck, you can write excellent, you can write WONDERFingFULL — and still not sell (strike that: reach an audience.) And Literature is laden with hacks who will be read so long as English is a living language. Connecting to an audience is magic; every genre contains a few writers who aren’t significantly better than their fellows but who somehow connect to an audience vaster by far than the genre. How? Why? Who knows. Nobody can intelligently argue that J.K.Rowling is head & shoulders superior to other miners of the Fantasy genre, except in sales. But she struck that chord that resonated with the Times & the Culture and the slot machine paid out BIG for her.

    2. Good IS an ante. Good is the bare minimum to be published (mebbe not so much anymore), what you have to kick into the pot to play in the game. After that, not so important although it probably matters when attending gatherings of other pros in the biz., people who understand the mechanics of writing and are all too eager to explain why your work is substandard (or substitute “any currently top-selling author who isn’t in the room” for your.)

    3. The audience don’t know good and don’t care ’bout good. See Ric Locke comment above about the size of the potential market that will read crap and like it. You can make a good living feeding that audience (not to insult McDonalds, but …) The audience doesn’t know much about Good but it knows what it likes.

    4. All work produced on deadline is substandard … for what the creator intended. “You want it good or you want it on time?”

    5. Remember the parable of the two hunters & the bear. You don’t have to be the best writer ever, you merely have to be the best writer whose work is released this week/month/time frame. If you write the GREATEST NOVEL EVAH and it hits the stands the same day Rowling drops a new Potter Tale … sucks to be you.

    6. Your fans generally don’t care what you write, they will read it. In politics this is the rule of the middle: 40% will vote for ANY candidate with a D, 40% will vote for the R. Your reader base is like that. Feed them Space Opera, Musketeers, Vampire Nun Musketeer Regency Faerie Tales, your base will buy it. Factor that into your sales analyses and look for which worls are breaking you out of your base aud. … and which are losing your base.

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  17. To encourage you to continue “Nuns in Space” this is what I tweeted:

    Nuns in Space! Or how writers can’t tell what people will like – bit.ly/shqIXH #amwriting #MyWANA #WANA1011

    Yeah, I know. My sense of humor sucks.

    Wayne

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  18. Confidence is a weird thing. Sarah covered that really well.

    But you don’t need confidence. What you need is a thick skin. Is it really going to hurt you if someone didn’t like what you wrote? No, it isn’t. And here’s the good part. From their complaints, you might learn something, and get better.

    But if you don’t publish, you’ll never, ever, learn what you could have been.

    Wayne

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        1. I write a lot of political commentary, and I know a lot of politicians. I’ve torn a politician apart one day, and traded civil emails with him the next. There’s nothing personal about it. I’m not attacking the person, I’m attacking the policy.

          As a result they are willing to talk to me, and I get things that help me write better articles, even if I never directly quote them.

          Take for example Attawapiskat Reserve – Fourth World Conditions in Canada. I have friends in both the Liberal and Conservative parties. The article is critical of both parties. Tomorrow I might be taking aim at the New Democratic Party, and yes, I have friends in it too.

          Politicians are like writers in that. They need to have a thick skin. Criticism of political policies, or of books, isn’t criticism of the people who worked on them.

          Wayne

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