I’m not going to lie, I’m bad at receiving feedback. I have a knee-jerk reaction of taking personal offense. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad that my Master’s program is online. I can give myself some space and work through my emotional muck enough to see the value of the feedback. It’s painful but if we want our work to meet its full potential, we have to be open to critique. As Harper Lee said, you need a thick hide to be a writer.
The pain may never fully disappear. I’ve been in and out of workshops since high school and I still take it personally. That’s especially true when a piece needs a lot of work. I’m not willing to admit it at first. If I give myself a day or two away from it, I can swallow my pride and admit that the reader might have a point. From there I can separate the useful feedback from the not-so-useful. I still choose which points to follow but I’m open to the possibilities.
It’s even worse for me when I receive critiques from my personal tutor. She’s very nice and the vast majority of what she says is constructive. Nevertheless, she’s a published writer. My aim with this program is to improve my writing but, not-so-deep down, I want to impress her, too. When her comments involve fully rewriting most (if not all) of the story, it’s hard to read. It’s especially painful since she’s often right.
Image retrieved from “Be a Better Writer: 4 Simple Steps to Take Today”The important thing is that I consider the advice. That’s all that matters when writers interact with critique. You can cry it out all you need to, so long as you look at it again and think it over before rejecting suggestions outright.
With the format of my program’s feedback sessions, it’s easy to give into defensive impulses. You post the story, someone responds, and you immediately want to reply with some explanation of your work or justification for your choices. I’m guilty of this. I understand the reason for it. You invested a lot of time and heart into your story, you know what you envision for it, but somehow your diamond did not shine so brightly for the reader.
My advice: DO NOT REPLY THE FIRST DAY. Let it sit for at least twenty-four hours. Then reexamine the critique, maybe reread your story, and decide if you really need to defend your writing. This time will also allow you to gather any questions you have and articulate them properly.
This tactic isn’t possible with live/synchronous workshops for obvious reasons. However, I highly recommend it with asynchronous feedback and when you’re getting feedback from friends. You probably have a limited amount of time to do so with any formal feedback sessions, so don’t spend too much time on it. Even a little time will give you enough perspective to respond appropriately. And when you’re exchanging stories with friends, well, they can carry on their merry way until you’re ready to shoot them an email nitpicking their nitpicks.
In addition to stepping back, remember that you have the final say pre-publication. You decide which changes to make and which to ignore. Do what you think is best for your work. If you give all feedback fair consideration, you’ll know what to do.
Do you have any special techniques or advice for handling critique? Drop a line in the comments.
Quote retrieved from Bloomsbury Literary StudiesIn this post I’m going to switch gears from Ernest Hemingway, the “man’s man,” to renowned author and feminist Virginia Woolf. Admittedly I’ve only read one of Woolf’s works, To the Lighthouse. I believe I’ve read “The Evening Party” as well but it was in a collection with several other writers that I read for an undergraduate short story class, so I’m not certain that’s the right story. Nevertheless, I find her very intriguing, both as a writer and as a human being. (We don’t always treat the former as the latter, so I feel it’s necessary to make that clarification.)
The quote I want to focus on is the title quote from her book-length essay A Room of One’s Own:
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Things have changed since Woolf’s time, in the writing world and society overall. We allow women more independence and more financial success in their own right. Does that make Woolf’s words any less true? Not necessarily.
Society still pressures women to be “good” wives and mothers. To add to the stress, everyone’s definition of a “good” wife and mother differs and some include the need to earn money. Kids, a significant other, a job–it’s no wonder many female writers have to put off writing until the kids have gone to bed. More women have their own money, but a “room of [their] own” can still be hard to come by.
What if you’re a single woman? A childless female writer? A male writer? Do Woolf’s words still apply? I would argue yes.
Whether we’re in a relationship or single, a parent or childless, man or woman or gender-less, we all have responsibilities bearing down on us. Household chores, self-care, paying jobs–writers have to eat, too–and much more can slow our writing progress. That’s before we add in our social lives (those of us who still have one), our immediate family outside of children and significant others, and our pets.
The best solutions to these obstacles? Money and a room of our own.
We may not be dependent on someone else’s money but we still need more money in order to free up time for writing. More money means fewer work hours needed, and fewer work hours are more hours for writing.
But do we really need a room of our own? It can mean seclusion and privacy, which begot focus and freedom. No distractions, no judgment. Just us, our ideas, and our writing. It’s why many writers withdraw into bedrooms or home offices, especially when their household is buzzing. Some even go to the extreme of renting offices outside of the home. Now that is the epitome of needing money and a room of one’s own to write fiction.
Portrait of Virginia Woolf
Photograph by George Charles Beresford, retrieved from the Virginia Woolf Wikipedia entryI know Virginia Woolf’s original statement wasn’t supposed to have this exact meaning. From my brief stint into her essay–please forgive me for using SparkNotes to research this post, I was pressed for time–I have come to understand that Woolf was trying to explain that women’s heralding duties and financial/legal ties to their husbands can affect their writing. As I said before, this interpretation of the quote maintains resonance to this day. Women may be more independent but society still pressures them in ways that men don’t always realize. However, the broader interpretation can aid all writers, no matter their gender.
You may not be able to resolve the money aspect of this issue, at least not for some time. It happens and we all have to face it at one point or another. You can only trudge through the daily work muck and hope for the best.
If you find yourself distracted by duties and losing time, you may be able to do something about it. Find a time and a place where you can set everything else aside and write. Set it in stone. Tell everyone–friends, family, your significant other–that that time and place are for writing and only writing. Some people may be mad but really, you have to write. A writer who doesn’t write is just a dreamer. Also, they can’t pester you about when your next story or poem will be published if they won’t let you write.
I digress. By carving out the time and place for writing, you are giving yourself a private writing nook that no one can take from you. You are creating a “room of [your] own”.
That’s it for this “Writers on Writing”. Keep an eye out for the next installation. I’ll be covering a personal favorite, satirist Mark Twain.
Until then, do you have anything to add to this post, either about the quote or Virginia Woolf? Do you have any writers/quotes on writing that you think I should discuss? Leave your suggestions in the comments or email me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com.
Have you ever tried on a friend’s glasses? You know how they make your vision blur, you become disoriented, and your head starts to hurt? Imagine that happening when you’re wearing your own glasses or with no glasses at all (if you don’t need them). Then move the pain to the left side of your head, make it throbbing, and increase the pain, pressure, and disorientation to the point that you’re crying. Add nausea and the threat of vomiting. Now imagine trying to write with that feeling. That’s a bit like my strife when I write during a migraine.
Migraine is a complex neurological disorder with a wide variety of symptoms. It can take several doctors ruling out all other possibilities for you to be diagnosed with migraines.
For the past week migraine symptoms have plagued me. A migraine headache nearly prevented me from completing last Monday’s article. Other migraine symptoms forced me to postpone this post repeatedly. As I sit here typing my head still hurts and my vision remains blurry. At least I can sit up and read.
I’ve had these attacks since I was ten years old. While people have started to empathize with my situation, it’s still hard to find people who know where I’m coming from, even among fellow writers. No one wants to talk about it.
This latest spike in my symptoms has given me the perfect opportunity to address a very important matter: writing with chronic illness or disability.
Writing is never easy. Writing with a chronic illness or disability is worse. Blindness, deafness, paraplegia, autism, epilepsy, the list is endless. Writing and meeting deadlines are a fight with your body, and not everyone in the writing and publishing worlds are patient about the matter. Yet you have to manage somehow or you’ll have no career.
Unfortunately, society doesn’t like talking about that sort of thing. We’ve become open about discussing depression and anxiety–issues I also struggle with and will address in another post–because they are prevalent among artists. Other conditions, however, are often ignored.
This post has been tough to write, and not just because of the symptoms. Many thoughts have rushed through my mind: how can I help other people understand this when I barely understand it? How can I avoid sounding like a martyr? I’ve been living this way for so long that it’s hard to tell what’s normal and what’s not unless I need to confine myself to a dark, isolated room. Even with a doctor’s diagnosis, how can I know for certain that I’m experiencing migraines and not overreacting? Most importantly, will anyone care to hear what it’s like?
That’s exactly why I’ve decided to write about my struggles. We need to initiate a discussion about writing with chronic illness and disabilities. If nothing else, writers who live and work with such conditions will not feel alone. They will know that someone understands and cares.
Despite popular misconception, migraines are not just really bad headaches. Light, odor, and sound sensitivity; blurred vision and other vision alterations; pulsating headaches; nausea and vomiting; dizziness; vertigo; aphasia; hallucinations. That all sounds bad enough but those aren’t the only possible symptoms. They vary from person to person and from one type of migraine to another. Not everyone experiences every symptom. The ones you experience and how badly you feel them can change over time. On top of that, migraines are erratic.
Now if they can simulate the nausea, excruciating pain, dizziness, and all the different sensitivities, we may get somewhere.
It’s impossible to explain. You know that Excedrin Migraine commercial in which the mother wears goggles that blur her vision in order to experience her daughter’s struggles? That’s a nice start but it barely scrapes the surface.
Luckily there are sites like migraine.com. A fellow writer/migraineur posted the link on Facebook and it’s taught me loads about migraine symptoms, triggers, and types of migraine.
Doing anything under these circumstances is difficult, if not impossible. Writing, an activity which relies heavily on the mind and the ability to construct coherent sentences? Not going to happen.
I would like to say that, after all these years, I’ve learned to successfully write with migraines but that would be a lie. I can force myself to write despite it and some things are easier to handle than others (social media posts come to mind). However, I beg for relief while I do it and I don’t remember a word of what I’ve written afterwards.
This week was not the first time migraine attacks interfered with my writing. I composed an essay about Moby-Dick, the one printed in the UC Davis Prized Writing Anthology, with a horrendous headache and puking. I could barely sit from the pain and dizziness. I don’t remember how but somehow the essay was written. I wrote many of my undergrad essays that way, actually.
Creative writing? I’d have a better chance at getting my father to stop cracking his insensitive jokes. OK, it might not be that hard but it comes pretty close.
So long as I nip the headaches and nausea in the bud with Imitrex, I can typically push past the visual auras, odor sensitivity, sound sensitivity, and dizziness. The work is crud and I have to rewrite it thoroughly but it gets written.
I never edit under these conditions. Focus is key and I can’t with any of these symptoms.
Even if you don’t get the headaches, you have to fight yourself to write with migraines. The aforementioned writer friend doesn’t often get the headaches. She does, however, experience dizziness, confusion, aphasia, and sometimes hallucinations. It disrupts her daily life and her writing.
Here’s the most important thing to remember: my friend and I aren’t giving up. We’re pursuing our dreams. We work through the symptoms when we can and, when it’s too bad, we’re not afraid to rest a day or two. One way or another, we write.
Chronic Migraine is debilitating and misunderstood. Many writers struggle with it and worse conditions, and yet they do not quit. As proof, I’m going to name some published writers who had/have chronic conditions and disabilities but still succeeded:
Lewis Carroll, beloved and complicated children’s author, is just one of many famous migraineurs.
Lewis Carroll (migraine): It’s believed that the images and sensations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass may have been based on Carroll’s experiences with disorientation and light sensitivity from migraines.
Virginia Woolf (migraine)
Miguel de Cervantes (migraine)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (dyslexia)
Octavia Estelle Butler (dyslexia)
Lord Byron (epilepsy and club foot)
H.G. Wells (diabetes)
Christy Brown (cerebral palsy)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (temporal lobe epilepsy)
Jorge Luis Borges (progressively went blind due to a genetic disorder)
John Milton (blindness): Believe it or not, John Milton lost his sight sixteen years before completing Paradise Lost. His daughters read to him and helped transcribe his writings.
As you can see, writers with chronic illness and disabilities are in good company.
Migraine and other chronic conditions are difficult to work with but not impossible. You just have to put in more effort to overcome your challenges. It’s nothing you can’t handle so long as you persevere. After all, what is a challenge to a writer but a story or poem in waiting?
For more information on writers and celebrities with such conditions, including migraine, visit these sites (which are also my sources for the above list):
I strongly encourage anyone with chronic migraine or any other chronic illness/disability to comment on their experiences here. Have any writers to add to this list? Drop those in the comments, too!
If you’re looking for works with disabled characters by disabled writers, be sure to check out this article from The Guardian.
Welcome back to Friday Fun-Day! I’ve been under the weather this week so I haven’t been able to come up with anything elaborate for today. I have, however, tracked down a quote on writing that gives me a chuckle.
Before I give you the quote, I have to preface it with a warning: I’m not 100% sure who said it. Some people say it’s Ernest Hemingway, others say it’s Red Smith. So I’m going to include the link to the website from which I retrieved the quote and leave you to research the original speaker for yourself:
Such fine words to live by. What’s a little blood when creating a masterpiece which may not even pay the bills? After all, writers are a bunch of masochists.
On that cheery note, I wish you all a happy and productive weekend of writing. I’m hoping to be back to full power by Monday, so keep an eye out for my next post on writing as a migraine sufferer.
Also, if you learn for certain which writer penned this quote, please leave that information and your source in the comments. Thanks!
Hello world and all who write in it! It’s the weekend once again, and I’m here to provide you with another excellent opportunity from our friends at Writer’s Digest.
There are no small opportunities, but this contest is definitely bigger than the last one. I’m walking about Writer’s Digest‘s Annual Writing Competition.
Here are the most important details:
The grand prize winner will be announced on a subscriber’s issue of the magazine, receive $5000 in cash, and much more.
There are nine different categories in which you can enter.
There are two deadlines, the early bird deadline on May 5th and the final deadline on June 1st.
The cost to enter varies depending on type of entry (poetry versus manuscript), number of entries, and the deadline. I normally wouldn’t recommend contests with entry/reading fees but Writer’s Digest is well-established and the contest is in its 86th year, so you can safely enter without fear of being scammed.
For full information on the contest and how to enter, follow this link:
