WHY CRITICISM OF YOUR WORK CAN BE THE BEST THING EVER.

It's been a while, hasn't it? Where the ruddy heck have I been? you are well entitled to ask.

Well, physically, nowhere. I'm still in the same draughty little Victorian terraced house with no internal doors on the bottom floor, in the same neck of the woods. But mentally and emotionally - well, stuff's happened. My son has had his last year of primary school before moving on up to secondary school, so it's been a year of eleven-plus-es, SATS exams and sorting out his new school. I've had to give up my allotment space, partly because it proved to be untameable (turns out there were good reasons why it had been left to go wild for two years before I claimed it, and its very untameable-ness was the main one.) But also because I decided to take on a volunteer job as a moderator on the Scribophile writing community site. It's a great gig, but not without its learning curve, and I've spent the last few months adapting to that curve (and frightening the pants off mental muscles I never knew I was supposed to have in the process.)

But through it all I have still been writing. Redemption has finally been exposed to some beta readers, and received a ton of useful feedback from those awesome beta readers. Yes, I now have detailed information about all the things that are wrong with the story and why I need to fix them.

'Oh no!' I hear you cry. 'After all that work, slogging away to make your story as good as it can be, now you're being told it's not working and you have to rewrite it all? How awful! You must be so disheartened!'

Actually... no. In fact, if anything, it's given me even more drive to work on it.

I'm not going to lie to you; there have been more than a few moments in the process where I've hung my head and thought "Holy cow, this thing is too flawed to ever be fixable. How could I have got it so wrong, whilst all the time believing I was getting it... well, at least a little bit right?"

See, that's the thing about criticism from living, breathing beta readers - the flaws they pick up on are rarely the ones you think they'll be. Oh sure, if you have an icky feeling that a certain plot point is a bit weak, or that this character's a bit flat and undeveloped, your beta readers are likely to notice it too. But sometimes they don't because their attention is drawn away by some other problem, that's way bigger and more noticeable - but something you thought was working just fine.

It's pure logic if you think about it; if you'd identified it as a problem you'd have fixed it already before giving it to beta readers, wouldn't you? But that doesn't make the unexpected criticisms any less of a curveball when they smack you in the guts. It makes you question your writing judgement momentarily - and sends your Inner Grinch into a happy-dance of smugness as he cackles "See? I told you you're not as good at this as you thought you were! Ha ha, those beta readers really took you down a peg or ten, didn't they? You and your high-falutin' ideas about being a 'proper writer!'"

(My Inner Grinch is a world-class git when he wants to be.)

It hurts, and he shouts so loud it's hard not to think that maybe he's right. But that's the time to take a deep breath and remember these important things:

- These flaws are not set in stone. They are fixable.
- Bad writing does not make you a bad writer. Even great writers do bad writing before shaping it into good (and then great) writing.
- If your beta readers have pointed out these flaws, they must trust you have the ability to fix it, otherwise they wouldn't bother giving you the feedback.

Then you can dive in and forage through what they've said - all the curveballs and nitpicks and unexpected misunderstandings - and take them apart.

Some of them will strike a chord with you straight away; the moment you read them you'll slap your forehead and say "Of course! How could I have missed that?" Those are the no-brainer, must-be-fixed notes.

Then there are the ones that make you think "Hmm... really? But that's how I intended you to interpret it - you don't like that? Oh... okay then..." Those are the ones where you can weigh up how strong the feeling is among your beta readers on this point (i.e. are they all saying it, or is it just one or two, with others saying the opposite?) against what your own vision for the story is and how true to that you want to remain.

And then there is a third category - and this is where a lot of the hidden gold is. You'll know when a piece of criticism falls into this category, because when you receive it you'll get an immediate urge to respond with sentences starting with "Yeah, but that's because..." or "No, actually, what's happening there is..."

Basically, it's anything you feel like the reader Just Isn't Getting or Doesn't Seem To Have Realised - and it's when, if you're smart, you bite back the urge to plotsplain and instead ask yourself "Why are they interpreting this thing this way?" Maybe you're not saying what you think you're saying, you haven't said enough, or you're saying too much. Whatever it is, readers are adding 2+3 when you want them to be adding 1+4.

Often it's because you know the backstory of both your world and the characters in it - what happened before this story started and how things got to be the way they are now - but, because you know your world so well, you're unable to see the way this alters the present-day world from 'the norm' the reader expects. An example: maybe in your sci-fi future-world they've been experimenting with genetically-modifying coffee beans for the last five years, trying to increase the yield. As an unexpected result of this experimental tomfoolery, coffee now produces the same effects as a Class-A drug.

You might take this information for granted and therefore not think it's necessary to include it, because you've been up to your eyeballs in your worldbuilding for months already. But your readers haven't, and without this key piece of backstory they're going to wonder why a) coffee seems to be the beverage of choice for addicts, and b) everyone behaves like lunatics every time they have a cup of joe. But they might not say it like that; they might instead say "these characters are a bit over-the-top in this scene," or "the hyped-up-on-endless-cups-of-coffee thing is a very tired cliche these days." So it's up to you to put the pieces together - and you can only do that by listening to feedback, rather than immediately going on the defensive.

Of course, this isn't to say that you must heed every single piece of advice and change your work accordingly. Sometimes a beta reader will not like something you've written because... they just don't like it. It's not their thing, or they wouldn't have done it that way themselves (this can often happen if they're writers too.) That's okay. All readers are different, which is a wonderful thing, or there would be far less variety across the genres and styles of books out there. Think of their comments as a barometer of the reading public in general, telling you which way your audience is likely to swing. So if your military sci-fi-loving beta reader is the one hating the romantic sub-plot in your epic fantasy, you can be reasonably reassured that you shouldn't ditch it based on just his say-so. In fact, his reasons for hating it might be exactly why fans of epic fantasy love it.

So don't fear criticism. It's there to make you a better writer, and it can help you to stretch yourself further than you ever thought you could reach. Good criticism points out the faults in the writing, not the writer, so feel free to ignore anything that attacks you personally. (But at the same time, resist the temptation to bite back. Swallow your pride, thank them for their time and move on. It might feel like they win, but honestly, mounting any kind of retaliation or even defence is a sure-fire way for you to really lose.)

Part of exposing your work (and by association, a teeny piece of your soul) to the world is getting a few scrapes and bruises to the ego. Critiques can sting a bit at first. But you toughen up a little bit more with each bump and knock, and eventually you'll come to see them for the character-building exercises they are. And you'll love them for it.

I've Been A Terrible Writer - Which Is Good To Know

At some point in their life - many, many points, if I'm to speak from my own experience - all writers worry that they're maybe, actually... rubbish at this writing lark.

They look at the Stephen Kings, the J.K.Rowlings, the George R.R. Martins and cry "I am not any of them, therefore I must suck!" They look at their current work-in-progress, stalled halfway through that awkward middle zone, and fret that it's not so much Writers' Block as 'writer is a blockhead.' Or they get yet another rejection from a publisher/agent, and imagine them cackling and emailing snippets of the submission to colleagues for them take the piss out of it, before struggling to type out their 'thanks but no thanks' with a straight face.

This week, I discovered that reading your old stuff is a great antidote to those 'I will never become a good writer' blues.

Sounds like a no-brainer, I know. But the reasons it can work so well are twofold. First, it lets you know you were definitely more rubbish in the past. And second, you can see exactly where and how you were rubbish. Both of which means you are now less rubbish - so if you keep on doing it, you can only get less and less rubbish until you are - pretty darn good at this writing malarkey. There's hope! It's not impossible - you just might make it someday!

Reading through the half-dozen or so novels I started but never finished, still languishing in their WIP Folder of Death on my hard drive, it was very clear I made the same mistakes with them, over and over again. That was why they never got finished. These were classic writing flaws; the kind that make successful authors and writing gurus do that face like they've just had lemon juice rubbed in a paper cut. I wouldn't have seen those glaring errors back then. I probably thought I was doing great. But now I'm doing the same lemon-in-the-paper-cut face - which is no easy feat when you're trying to bang your head on your desk at the same time. How could I have thought this was the right way to do it? What an utter plank!

In order to elaborate - and hey, maybe give you a laugh and help you feel better about your own insecurities - let me give you some idea of my cringiest sins. Don't worry, I'll spare you the actual text itself, in favour of brief summaries that could be applied quite universally to just about all of my early attempts:

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Main Character Info-Dump!
 "Chapter One, first paragraph - right then, here's my main character. I'm now going to tell you everything about him; what he looks like, what he does for a living, a nice big chunk of background info about his childhood - ooh, and all his issues and insecurities as well. Hell, can't forget THAT! Hey wait - where are you going? No, come back - you NEED to know all this stuff before I can start telling you the actual story..!"
 I did this Every. Single. Time. In every half-finished novel from my past. You'd literally only just met my main character and there I was, giving you not so much an introduction as a case study from his psychotherapist. Readers don't want that. It feels like they've met the literary equivalent of The Nutter On The Bus (you know - that complete stranger who comes and sits next to you and within five minutes they've told you their entire life story, including that bit about their operation that meant they couldn't sit down properly for six weeks afterwards...) Most importantly - and it clearly took me a while to realise this - they don't need to know it all upfront. Get on with the bloody story, and drip the background stuff in quietly as events unfold.

I'm Going To Tell You Exactly How She Really, REALLY FEELS!
"She's upset! Really REALLY upset! I need you to be in no doubt about just how upset she is - how can I convey this? Goddamn it, I don't think there are enough adverbs in the English language to fully convey the depths of her upset-ness -  I've already run out, and I haven't even finished the paragraph!"
Ermmm... yeah. When it came to Big Emotional Scenes, I had this tendency to go huge. If you'd turned any of my early efforts into a movie, they'd probably look like one of those early talkies from the 'thirties, where the heroine would clasp her hand to her forehead and fling herself face-down on the bed to show she was unhappy - in case the audience didn't quite get it from her wailing "Aaarrrggghh, Rodrigo NOOOOOO!!" and bursting into tears. Lesson learned: you really can have too many adverbs. Way too many. In fact, you don't need them at all more often than you think.

How It Works 101
"Okay, if you're going to believe in this funky new techie thing I've invented for the purpose of this novel, you need to know EXACTLY how it works... Whaddya mean, 'you don't care?' This is SCIENCE FICTION, you Luddite! Now pay attention..."
A variation on the Main Character Info-Dump, this was a side-effect of working as a software technician for four years. In that line of work, if you came up with some new snippet of coding, software program or Way of Doing Stuff, you had to justify the hell out of it if you didn't want to endure the ridicule and scorn of your peers and superiors (especially if you were one of that rare and peculiar species, a Female.) And, for a long time, I got into a habit of thinking I had to do that for the pretend techie stuff in my novels as well. You don't - at least, not to that extent. You still need to do enough research to be sure what you've invented is at least plausible - because if you don't, there are certainly people out there who'll pick holes in it if it isn't (I've worked with some of them.) But you don't need to include the instruction manual in your novel.

Green Screen, Green Screen, Blah Blah Blah...
"Where are they? Well... it's a ROOM, isn't it? What kind of room? A - a ROOMY room! Aw jeez, bored now - can I do dialogue instead, please?"
For all my Baz Luhrmann-esque enthusiasm when it came to conveying character emotions, when it came to setting the scenes I barely even bothered to phone it in. Obviously you can go over-the-top when it comes to painting your scenic visuals - but it's fair to say I was under-the-bottom. It seemed to me like an unnecessary chore to offer any description of the venue in which my characters were acting their little socks off; I'd already said they were on a street, and everyone knows what a street looks like, don't they? Y'know.. roads, pavements, stuff...
Maybe I forgot that readers didn't have an admission ticket to the inside of my head, to watch the same brain-movie I was watching. As it was, all they were getting were the blank green-screens, while I was taking my full-on, writer's-privilege-CGI-experience completely for granted. I still find writing descriptions of my settings a bit of a chore. But now I take the time to do it anyway, because if I'm always the one getting the best view of the movie, it's only fair.

Thunderbirds Are Go!
"Okay... so now we're on the Adverb Diet, how else can I make my characters convey emotion? Nodding heads - yeah, that's a good one, especially when the character's about to answer a question with a 'yes.' Ooh - and head-shaking for 'no' - GENIUS!  And don't forget arm-waving and shrugging - whoops, I mean shrugging HIS SHOULDERS... and - oh look, if I pull this string his leg goes up and that makes him look anxious..!"
Yep - that was my compensatory strategy after identifying and attempting to cure my Adverb Overload Disorder. Hey, why make them sound bloody ridiculous when I can make them look bloody ridiculous instead? From thirties pulp movie to sixties puppet show; there's progress for you. I had a whole bunch of 'stock gestures' I would roll out for each specific emotion - over and over and over again.... In one of my novels, I used the phrase "he raked his hand through his hair" so many times I began to wonder if this was actually a story about mullet gardeners. It's not a bad phrase for describing character action - but after bingeing on it so indiscriminately in that one project it'll probably be a cold day in hell before I ever use it again. And if I'm honest... this is an affliction I'm still battling. I'm aware of it now, which is a good thing - but I'm still very much in the process of trying to cure myself. One day at a time, and all that.

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Betcha glad you never read any of my early works now, eh? (I know I am.)

I've still got a long way to go before I'd be comfortable actually saying, out loud, the words "I am a good writer." But after today, I'm totally happy to say "I'm not as rubbish a writer as I used to be." I have grown. I have improved. I haven't reached my destination yet - but at least I know it's worth carrying on up that highway.

I might go back to some of those old novels one day; with my new perspective, the basic ideas behind them could still work if I took the time to write the actual stories properly. I'm glad I looked at them again, and I'm glad I don't do those things I used to do anymore (or at least that I'm better at catching myself when I do.)

But most of all, I'm really glad I don't still believe those early works stood a chance of being published - as I'm pretty sure I must have done back then. Now that would be embarrassing....