Conviction Does Not Mean Convention
Normally, I hire
based on eagerness. It has always been easier to train someone excited to do
the work than to bring in a begrudging expert. It’s one of the reasons I
suggest giving your family and friends a chance to learn how to give good
feedback instead of writing them off for one inadequate experience. Help them
grow, get comfortable, and learn how to talk to you before saying, “Oh no. My
mother is too nice.”
If you have someone
who wants to help you, who wants to read your work, developing
successful techniques to communicate is more likely to yield a good partner
than trying to find someone perfect and then convincing them to help. For many
authors, your mother will be your worse critic, and not necessarily in a useful
way, but even for those that “She’s too nice to give real feedback” ring true,
you can work your way through that. If they’re willing, you’d be surprised what
you can tweak.
But there are some
exceptions. Case in point, there was a woman with a fantastic attitude, who
asked me if she could read my writing
then proceeded to do so in a timely fashion. She was friendly, respectful, and
a perfect partner in every way… except she didn’t know what she was talking
about.
She didn’t offer up
opinions like I had wanted, instead sticking to typos, grammar, spelling,
formatting, more black and white issues with distinctive rules. I wanted critiques
more along the lines of “I can’t stand this character” over proofreading—saved
for later in the process—but I’d take what I could get. Most authors, myself
very much included, have a ridiculously hard time getting people to read their
work. (On that note, if you are a writer, or a reader, and are interested in
giving/trading feedback, hit me up at info.daveler@gmail.)
However, when I
began to read her actual notes, I found some problems. Among a few outright incorrect
suggestions, she questioned pretty common conventions. She asked me, at one point,
why I had included a dash at a certain spot… an interruption in a piece of
dialogue.
I see this from
time to time. We as readers don’t pay attention to how people write, and that’s
often the point. I’m astounded when you have an author who has a completely
unique style from what everyone else is doing (not necessarily in a good way)
and he is absolutely oblivious to the fact that it’s so different it’s almost
distracting, telling you it’s the right, and only, way to do it.
Like the so-called
freelance editor who claimed merely inserting ums and ers would make for good
dialogue, or the purple poet who thought good style means never ending in a
preposition. Their writing was so distinctive and uncommon that you couldn’t find a published piece that did things even
similarly, and yet they were insistent that it was THE way to write, that you
learned how to do it like them before you could have a “voice.”
No one writes like
that; yours is more of a risk than what you’re denouncing. In fact, in my
subjective opinion, their rules for the inexperienced writer were actually what
was holding their writing back the most.
I’ve used clichés
before that people accused of being purple prose:
“He clamped his
mouth shut.”
“With what?”
I’ve witnessed long
winded arguments about whether or not readers would understand italics being
used for thoughts by a writer who’d never seen it done before.
I’ve read a myriad
of manuscripts that don’t punctuate dialogue in the way what every single book
you can pick up does.
The point is,
convention isn’t always recognized.
But I’m not talking about this out of frustration or disapproval, but inspiration. When I see someone adamantly insist of the peculiarity of a conventional decision, it reminds me that everyone’s perspective truly is different. Their experiences, what they notice, what they deem to be true, doesn’t undermine my reality. Just because they don’t remember seeing something done a certain way before doesn’t mean you can’t do it that way, or that everyone will agree with them.
I’m a gullible
person, surprisingly enough, and it’s not uncommon that if someone speaks with
conviction, even if I know a great deal about the subject at hand, I’m more
likely to trust them, question myself, and adhere to the reality that they
state. It is times like this, when people insist with the upmost surety, that I
am reminded about how unsure everything is.
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