Critical Friendships

As I finish my first unit of my Masters, I have been thinking about the benefits of critical friends. And then the pros and cons of internet groups compared to face-to-face groups, for many of us this is going to come down to how as individuals we interact better with different groups.

Online critical friendships can be great in that you can take longer to look over comments and suggestions before you need to react. You can even go over them several times. Your work or the work you are reading/critiquing is written clearly in front of you and you can read over it several times to be sure that you have gleaned the importance and meaning of every word. But your critics are in some ways an unknown at the other end of a line somewhere. You can’t see their reaction, their initial response to your words. It takes time to get responses and queries answered.

I have found that I need to be sure that my critical friends are real people. In one of the first meetings I attended with my current group, my writerly friend had a short story that he wondered if it would elicit a particular response, but was not going to tell me what he hoped that response was. So he read and I patiently listened, allowing the words to wash over me and as he finished I reached for a tissue to dry my eyes.

‘What sort of response do you want?’ I blubbed.

‘That one is fine.’

It was a very moving story, and it gave him more to see my initial response to hearing it than he would have got if I had emailed with my response. I did read it again after some small edits, and it was emailed through, and I sobbed out loud at my desk. It’s ok, my work colleagues already think I’m nuts. But I could email back that it worked well, same response.

It is more direct to be sitting with a group of people. I find it more helpful to be able to ask immediately if something works or not, to ask how to improve it, such as ‘What if…if she did this…or that?’

Each group is different too and different ways work for different people. My current group like to read out their work for comment. I have belonged to other groups where we had copies of what was being read so that we could follow along, or it was emailed out ahead of time and we could just work through comments during the group time.

If you have the chance to join a critical friendship, think about what might work best for you and don’t be afraid to try something different. I prefer the face-to-face interaction but I’m learning the benefits of online friendships too.

Happy Scribbling.

Searching for something you already have

Some days I go in search of inspiration. I eagerly click through my favourite blogs hoping that today’s post will have some magical content to reconnect me to my flagging muse.

Sometimes I find it; sometimes I find it somewhere unexpected. Unfortunately this is not usually the case and I don’t find what I’m looking for out there. I need to find it in here. Generally I am able to sit at the computer every morning and bang out a good 1000 words without waiting for the muse to find me. But every now and then I need reminding that I am able to do this.

I am at that point today…searching. Sitting in my day job office I can hear a piano in the distance, a busker somewhere in the city playing. It is beautiful, the parts that I can hear, but I’m not getting all of it. I am straining through the noise of the traffic and shoppers, and the different pitches of the pedestrian walk. At times I can’t hear it at all and then several notes fight through the other noises to get to me. That is just enough for me to know that if I was to take a quiet few minutes I could possibly write something.

I did find a post about productivity – volume and output. Not just in words, but in the number of works. And it struck me that I may not be as productive as I could be. In fact I’m certain of it. I could be writing more often, I could be adding to my very poor list of finished works (currently at one) and increasing my chances of getting published. The more I write the better I get and so my chances improve.

If I am able to publish enough I can spend my whole day writing, not just thinking about writing. Then when I get home I’m generally too tired, time poor etc to write anything. Quite often I miss the window. I know I do. The house is quiet, the kids are settled and I think I could go now, I could get a lot done, but I wait and I potter with other things, and I watch just five more minutes of some rubbish on the box and then the window is closed and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. But if I had moved to the study the moment I had the thought then I would happily tap away at the keyboard lost in some wondrous world of my own making for an hour or two before it even occurred to me that I was too tired to be there.

For one of my courses I am currently between units, so I have a little less pressure this week. My aim it to spend the time that I was spending on study, on my writing instead.

Happy Scribbling

The Gardener

Over the last couple of weeks I have been very busy, again, or is it still? I am trying to do so much and it seems that the more writing I do the more ideas I get. So in an attempt to try and increase my sanity I have hired a gardener.

‘Wow!’ you think. ‘A gardener, oh for such luxuries.’

Or did you think, ‘Yeah, right. Her dad pops round with the mower once a week.’

We have to be so careful with our words to ensure that the right message is being passed on. So that readers fully understand the story that is happening in our heads. That transfer to paper can be a real killer for any story.

The truth of the above statement about the gardener is that I have hired a company to pop around on a regular (and depends on the season as to how regularly he does pop around) to mow the lawn and trim the edges.

It may not seem like much, but it was one of those little things that were starting to tip the scale on my sanity. I was getting more and more worked up that I couldn’t get it all done on my own. So I decided to focus on what I can do, what I want to do and outsource some of the things I can’t do. And it isn’t that I can’t mow the lawn. I’m one of those fiercely independent types constantly trying to prove that I can do anything I need to. It just means less stress. And I’m all for that.

The other little bugbear over the last couple of weeks has been the state of the house. Not that it was that bad, not a call in the ‘current affairs type programs’ to look at what she is inflicting on her children type of bad; just a little overwhelming. Piles of notes, books, ‘artwork’, ‘treasures’ found in a variety of places and carried home, study notes (not always in the study), novel notes (again not always in the study). So I spent some time moving things to where they should live and ruthlessly disposing of the rubbish hiding amongst the piles disguised as useful. Unfortunately my daughter has inherited my gene for “let’s hold onto that because you just don’t know when it will be useful, wanted, needed etc”.

I am now feeling calmer, cleaner and more on top of things. Less time stressing and more time writing. It is how the world should be.

Happy scribbling.