Comments on: Give Yourself License to Try

By: why i am glad i am not published « Literary Life Notes

why i am glad i am not published « Literary Life Notes — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:11:12 +0000

[...] Kole had a great POST about allowing yourself to grow as a writer, where she [...]

By: Joan

Joan — Sat, 08 May 2010 02:36:56 +0000

Nothing is ever written in stone . . . except for the Ten Commandments, but even they were rewritten after Moses smashed them.

By: Cat Woods

Cat Woods — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:22:14 +0000

Greta, that’s how I feel. I was getting a ms ready for submission the other day and was rereading it before I hit print. He said, “What’s changed since you last edited it?”

Unless you’re a writer, you can’t possibly understand the compulsion to move things around to see how they work somewhere else. I love editing, especially the big edits that can change the whole scope of your story.

Fun stuff~ cat

By: Greta Marlow

Greta Marlow — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:25:03 +0000

Wonderful! I think I’ll make my husband read this so he’ll understand why I keep tinkering with my manuscript, even though it’s “finished.”

By: Toni

Toni — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:45:30 +0000

Playing – Isn’t that what brought me to writing in the first place? The desire to run to my sandbox, with shovel and pail, to build a world of tunnels and toy cars and sticks and pebbles. If I could only tune out the censor in my head, the voice that says, “this will never sell, are you kidding me, this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t sound like so and so’s book”, then just maybe I can build my world according to what feels right to me.

By: Melissa

Melissa — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:31:46 +0000

I did the same thing as Lisel. I wrote the first sixty pages of my manuscript in first person, then realized the book needed to be in third. I didn’t go back to the beginning right away, though. I just finished the story in third and ended up with this weird half-first, half-third person first draft. Since then, I’ve rewritten the beginning many, many times. There’s no end of revision in sight yet.

By: Peter Dudley

Peter Dudley — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:49:48 +0000

Excellent advice, well summed up in the final sentences.

When I was about 10 and learning to ski, my older brother got me going by saying, “The one thing to remember is that if you don’t fall down, you’re not having enough fun.” I try to remember that lesson in all aspects of life.

By: Kristi

Kristi — Thu, 06 May 2010 04:02:18 +0000

This is so true. I’m having so much fun playing around with my ms and just added a new POV. At some point when I start querying, the process might not seem so fun, so I figure I’ll enjoy this time while it lasts.

By: Christina Bell

Christina Bell — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:42:01 +0000

Funny you should post this now. My fourth graders and I just had a long conversations about finding a balance between knowing/following the rules of fiction and using your imaginative ideas. We used Picasso as an example of someone who could work within the art school perameters of creating portraits, but could also play with the rules in fascinating ways. Later that day, we saw the New York Times story about the Picasso that sold for 106.5 million. What timing!

By: Anissa

Anissa — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:06:34 +0000

I just finished a complete rewrite of my story. Started with a blank Word doc and made it new, better. And it is. Now I have a 90K word manuscript (which needs some trimming) and a 45K word cut file. Plus the original 70K word manuscript. That’s a lot of words that went into making this story right. But I needed every one.

Thanks for the reminder.