Am I being too hard on myself or should I give up completely?

[SheilaT]

14. It's hard to improve on what the others have already said.

There's wonderful advice here. Just read it carefully.

I am someone for whom grammar and punctuation and spelling comes pretty easily. My friends call me the Grammar Witch. Imagine what my non-friends say. And even with that, I constantly find mistakes in my writing.

I will just add my two cents.

1. Simply get down whatever it is you want to say. Don't worry at first about the niceties, like grammar, punctuation, and so on. At the very end you can hire someone if those are a huge stumbling block for you.

2. Keep in mind that the essence of writing is rewriting. Be prepared to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Once, someone helped me revise a short story (maybe 1500 words) and towards the end she expressed guilt that she'd made me work so hard. Ha! I knew that with her help and the very extensive rewrite the story was made immeasurably better. It still wasn't good enough to be published, alas.

3. After you've done a first draft, put it aside for at least a week or two. Longer if it's a novel. If put aside long enough, you start to forget what it was you were thinking about in the first place, and you'll do a much better job of revising.

4. If more than one reader says something along the lines of, "I don't get that," then YOU'VE not made it clear. There's nothing wrong with the readers.

5. And this is really a corollary of 4: try very hard to join a group. Or take a creative writing class at your nearby junior college. You don't need to tell them you've been working on this novel for six years, just do whatever you're supposed to do for the class. It will be enormously helpful.


As an addendum: I was taking a creative writing class at the University of Colorado many (more than 20) years ago. It was a typical class: we'd write stories, make enough copies for everyone in the class, and then critique them. Heck, this was so long ago that some of us, myself included, didn't yet have computers. Anyway, one evening the instructor cut the class short, then read us a a story he'd written. And just as I was getting ready to raise my hand and point out all the obvious flaws, he told us that he'd just found out that day that the story was a first place winner in the current quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest. For those of you who don't know, that's a very important science fiction contest, and any number of well-known s-f writers have gotten their start there. This was maybe five years into the contest, and I was the ONLY person in the class who knew what this meant, mainly because I had submitted a story to them a year or two earlier.

The point is, success can be unexpected and wonderful, but no matter what, keep on writing.

SheilaT, who keeps on writing.