Second-Guessing Yourself (or How Can You Really Trust Your Intuition?)

After thinking about a story for years and trying to write it for more years than I care to count, I had a break through a few months ago and managed to get the words of the story down on paper.

Every afternoon I sat down to type out the next chapter, and the next, and received a gift, a miracle, of sorts, as page after page began to appear on the screen. 

Over the course of a few months the words began to add up, and I found myself with a chapter, and then another chapter, until I looked up one day and found myself with 40,000 words, enough to qualify the work-in-progress as a novel for middle graders.

Of course, just because a manuscript contains a certain number of words doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a book. (We all know this, right?) But, after revising it ten or twenty times, this manuscript felt like a book. It felt complete and as close to what I’d envisioned as possible.

And then, for the first time in years, I dreamed about two of the people in the story. They had died years ago, but in the dream they expressed their pleasure with the story and how I’d told it.

I dreamed of one of my writing teachers, too, a woman who I considered my writing mentor. She was known for her excruciating honesty, and in my dream she was smiling as she told me, with a certain amount of pride, that I’d done it.

So, I felt good about the manuscript. It was as good as I could get it. Good enough to believe it was ready to share. So, I sent it out to an agent who another writer had kindly recommended.

The agent wrote back quickly to say that she loved the story. She described the writing as beautiful. She enjoyed spending time with the main character. But she had one concern. The pace was too slow. Editors today, she explained, want fast-paced stories right from the start.  

So she passed on the book, and now I have a dilemma.

Do I leave the story alone or do I trust the opinion of an unknown but generous and warm-hearted reader who has vast experience in the marketplace and who knows the tastes and desires of editors looking for manuscripts to publish?

It's hard to evaluate our own work, especially when we're so close to it, which is why it might be best to put the manuscript aside for a while and take another look in a few months.

What would you do? 

For more information on trusting intuition or second-guessing yourself, visit:

http://cauldronsandcupcakes.com/2013/03/22/honouring-your-intuition-why-arent-you-doing-it/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/10/trusting-intuition-helen-fisher-gut-instincts_n_3530420.html

http://examinedexistence.com/daniel-kahnemans-on-why-we-shouldnt-always-trust-our-gut-feelings/

http://sarahockler.com/2011/12/20/are-you-an-ideal-critique-partner/

Trustworthy Feedback

By the time we reach the end of a draft--whether it's our first or forty-second attempt--we’re so close to the work that we can’t always see it clearly.

That's when it's helpful to ask for feedback, to rely on another pair of eyes to help us see and understand what we may have accomplished (and what we may still need to do).

But who do we trust to give us feedback on our work? How do we know if our critique partner or editor or agent is looking out for our best interest rather than her own?

Some readers may view our work negatively or in a harshly critical light, diminishing our sense of self worth (and the worth of our work), while others may view our work in a positive light, offering favorable comments and expanding our view of what we're capable of doing (and seeing).

Getting trustworthy feedback is tricky.

You might spend weeks and months working on a story, finally feel you’ve gotten it just right, and share it with someone to confirm your feelings that it’s done.

If you give it to a partner, a spouse, a parent, or a neighbor's child, you’re likely to receive a glowing report, which may be true, or it may be slanted because of their love for you. (“You’re great and anything you write is great, too!”) Or it may be glowing because they don’t want to hurt your feelings and can’t tell you the truth. Or your manuscript may be ok in some places but not in others, and they don’t know how to tell you.

If you give it to another writer--a friend or a workshop colleague--you may receive a negative or lukewarm response in the form of “I expected the character to do this...” or “I was disappointed the story didn’t go that way.” And most likely that’s the way the other writer would have written the story. In other words, other writers may have their own agendas, ones hidden even to themselves.

Editors and agents, too, may have their own agendas. Some may encourage you to shape the story so it’s more commercially appealing. Others may want it to contain more romance, more adventure, more violence, more ______ (fill in the blank) in order to make it, well, more commercially appealing.

Finding trustworthy feedback takes a certain amount of luck and persistence, as well as clear insights into human nature. You want to find a reader who can offer feedback that you can trust about such things as how the plot unfolds and whether the through-line is clear and if the character’s motivation has been fully developed.

Even when you find such feedback, you may discover trustworthy readers differ from one another. Each has different tastes and different strategies for how to craft a story.

What’s crucial is that you find a reader who is respectful of what you’re trying to do on the page and is willing to help you try to achieve it.

The key is to find someone who helps you open the door to your own creativity and imagination, who inspires you to dig deeper, explore further, and, most of all, who can help you keep pursuing the dream that is your story as it unfolds in your heart.

For more on finding a reader to trust, visit:

http://talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com/2011/08/critique-partners-finding-and-valuing.html

http://clarekirkpatrick.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/critique-and-confidence/

http://krissidallas.tateauthor.com/2011/02/04/averting-disaster-the-power-of-a-good-critique-partner/

http://voices.yahoo.com/critique-partners-trustworthy-devious-816615.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/R3BE1FYFTQI8GX

http://www.embowman.com/2011/about-my-critique-partner/

http://kidlit.com/2010/04/14/critique-connection/