The
Importance of Being Ruthless
Corinna Weyreter
The problem with entering stories into competitions,
or submitting them to magazines, is that most editors lack either the time or
the inclination to enlighten the unsuccessful writer as to where she’s going
wrong. If the rejections keep rolling in there comes a point when, clearly, she
needs to know.
When I found myself in this situation, a search of
the web led me to YouWriteOn, a peer review site for writers. Members can upload
a short story, or the opening chapters of a novel, and receive one critique in
return for each they write, with assignments allocated by the system at random.
It’s an excellent way to improve your writing, not only because people highlight
the weak points in your work, but also because you learn from seeing the weak
points in theirs, which can often be the same. To be a good writer you need to
be an avid reader, but high quality novels are written by experienced authors
and have been edited several times before publication. They make writing look
easy. So it’s extremely useful to also read the work of aspiring authors, where
problems with plot, pace, characterisation, clichés, similes, overused
adjectives and adverbs abound, because if these things are sabotaging your own
manuscript, you’ll be primed to root them out.
Inevitably some critiques are less valuable than
others, usually because the writer is keener to receive a review than produce
one, but by the time you’ve amassed ten or so, valid criticisms start to recur.
In the case of my stories, these were of dialogue that didn’t sound realistic,
and a lack of description that prevented the reader from being fully drawn into
the story. I was told that one character was too much of a caricature, and that
another behaved in a way that seemed inconsistent with his nature. There were
also some positive reviews that made me feel good but ultimately left me no
wiser, and others that simply disliked the plot, but what could I do about that
except write a completely different story? No writer can please everyone. It
was the hardest reviews to read that were usually the most useful, and once the
dejection started to wear off, I could see that the criticisms were valid. In
fact, not only were they valid, I’d actually been aware of them myself but had chosen
to ignore them.
I realised that the main reason for this was I hadn’t
always trusted my instincts when I was editing. A devilish voice had persuaded
me to spare those clichés that caused a twinge in my gut the instant I reread
them, insisting they really were sentences of poetic beauty. Not trusting my instincts
prevented me from cutting out words that I’d spent hours writing, and from investing
even more time knocking others into shape. It was only when reviewers confirmed
my suspicions, and after I’d seen similar mistakes in others’ work, that I learnt
to stop listening to that fiendish voice. Reading the stories aloud proved to
be a great help in doing this. Any problems with the flow of the prose quickly
became apparent, and unrealistic dialogue in particular was impossible to
ignore.
It’s sometimes hard to see what’s going wrong with a
story when you’re so involved in it. Only an outsider can tell you if it’s
really working the way you want it to. Other writers helped me face up to
aspects of my writing that I needed to work on; I wasn’t going to get away with
not putting more effort into it. I began to examine my writing with a more critical
eye, to be on the lookout for common mistakes, and to edit it more ruthlessly before
being satisfied. Because it didn’t matter how much time I’d invested in it up
until then, if I didn’t really believe it was perfect, why would anyone else?
Corinna Weyreter won the 1998 Bridport Prize and has
had several short stories published. She worked in the oil business for fifteen
years before resigning to sail around the world with her boyfriend. Her book
about their trip, Far Out: Sailing into a
Disappearing World, was published this year by Sunpenny Publishing.
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