The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [40]
This way you'll at least have written the draft of a readable story.
Or, to be more positive, lets state the point this way: what seems obvious to the writer may be obscure as hell to the poor reader. And you're writing for the reader, not for yourself. Aren't you?
Check your copy. Ask yourself where you might have been carelessly or purposely subtle or unclear. Straighten it out. Make the point obvious! Drop your fears. If you're like almost all the learning writers I have ever known, being too obvious is the least of your problems. Being obscure—whether intentionally or by accident—may rank near the top of your woes.
My problem student, Wally, once brought me a scene in which his western hero was shot. The bullet hit the hero, knocking him down, and Wally then wrote:
Bart looked down at the gaping hole in his chest, and realized he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was bleeding to death. He decided this was serious.
I told Wally I thought he might have overdone it.
But unless your story statement is in Wally's league of obviousness, don't worry about it. Anything short of the Wally standard is probably going to turn out just about right.
27. DON'T CRITICIZE YOURSELF TO DEATH
ONE OF THE HARDEST THINGS a writer has to do is to learn how to be self-critical (which leads to improvement) but not picky, worrisome or fretful. For all those negative, self-doubting attitudes are self-destructive.
Sure, you should—you must—look at your copy with a critical eye, always trying to see flaws and problems that need improving. But you must be aware of the danger of going too far, of getting stale and scared and beginning to beat up on yourself rather than trying to help yourself improve.
The most common form of lethal self-criticism, it seems to me, is often heard in the young writer's wail, "This story I wrote is really dumb!" Or, "I hate my lead character; she's really dumb!" Or, "This whole plot line is dumb!"
What writers who utter such lines are really saying, I think, might be paraphrased as follows: "This is the best I can do, but I'm deathly afraid it isn't slick and clever enough, and therefore you are going to think I'm a stupid person for having written it."
Such fears are as much a part of writing fiction as headaches, wads of crumpled paper on the floor, and rejection slips. When you write fiction, whether you realize it or not (and at some level you probably do), you are risking revelation of your dreams and deepest emotions. It's frightening to reveal yourself this way, even indirectly. Further, the act of writing is tied very close to a person's ego structure; I have seen students shaky with worry when I was about to read one of their routine classroom essays, or even a brief paragraph of factual material. "Criticize my work, criticize my personal essence" the feeling seems to be. The most humdrum piece of writing somehow represents the writer's worth as a person sometimes. Small wonder, then, that the writer of a story or even (horrors!) a novel often gets worried sick—literally—about whether the reader may think it's dumb. Because if it's dumb, the writer is dumb. And if the writer is dumb, he is also, ipso facto, worthless, an object of potential ridicule... doomed.
Thus it's perfectly natural for you to worry that some character or bit of dialogue or plot line you just wrote may be "dumb."
It's natural—but it's also dangerous.
Especially when you're writing rough draft in a story, your job is not to be a critic. It's to be a creator. Any thought during this time that "This is dumb" is a bad thought, a thought likely to screw up the imaginative process. If such a thought comes to you as you're writing early-draft copy, you must recognize it as bad, toss it out of your mind, and simply press on.
As I'm sure you know, the human brain is composed of two hemispheres. The right hemisphere, or half, is the seat of emotion,