A long time a go I remember seeing a non infomercial interview with Tony Robbins. Robbins is a life coach to the stars, and made a name for himself selling a series of self help programs.
I can’t vouch for his system, but something he said stuck with me:
“You can’t pretend there are no weeds in your garden.”
By this he means that you can’t pretend away problems in your life, and he’s right. If a four hundred pound man is punching you in the face no amount of wishing will make it stop. Trust me on this one.
It’s such a good quote that I thought I’d apply it to writing, and again, pretending there are no problems with your writing will lead you to ruination.
I’ve done it. Most of the mistakes I’ll warn you against I’ve either made or at least contemplated before*. I pretended that I didn’t need to learn anything about writing before I had a stab at my first novel. Even as I continued writing it, and it got progressively worse, I still pretended that I could keep going.
Yeah… that didn’t end well.
The lesson here is that you can’t pretend your way to publication. If you know there is something wrong with your writing, and for 99% of us there will be something, then just forging ahead without addressing it will not fix it.
So, if you will permit me, I’d like to set you all some homework. Identify a problem in your work. It could be bad grammar, clunky dialogue or even poor characterisation. Then do whatever it takes to find out how to fix it.
Once you know what to do, then VERY CAREFULLY write your next page with this in mind. Then put the page aside and go and have a hot drink. When you come back re read the page to yourself out loud and see if the problem has been fixed.
It took me three tries to fix a dialogue problem I was having, but it worked. So give it a try with your Work In Progress and let me know how it goes!
* A possible exception is sending a dead animal to an agent. I’ve never even considered that, but I can tell you it’s a bad idea anyway.
