Giving, receiving and understanding criticism

Replicated from my SheWrites blog, 14 February 2011.

I loved fantasy as a child. My favourite books were by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (regardless of my mum’s disapproval), and my early stories were all centred on magic kingdoms and special abilities, mysteries to be discovered and ‘perfect’ heroines. I was writing to define myself, to escape from the negative of reality and to create a fantasy into which I would fit.  Now I think back, there was always a strong feminine element in my early writing, always a female central character, child or adult, and she was always tough, clever and strong.

I loved reading and writing in primary school (prior to age 12) and none of my creative efforts were ever critiqued or questioned. I learnt myths and legends of every culture throughout history as part of my early schooling, and this helped me feel confident in remaining in the fantasy world, however contrived. It was in high school that I was faced with a harsh truth; my writing couldn’t only be about me in isolation of reality. In other words, my little fantasy world was to be slowly eroded as my writing came into contact with others. The urge to write and have others ‘get’ me through my writing was stronger than the urge to write for myself alone. I sought understanding and connection through my writing without even being aware.

So it was a rude shock when at age 13 I submitted what I thought was the first chapter of an epic fantasy that would evolve into well-loved volumes akin to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings collection, and was told by a young, intelligent, challenging English teacher: ‘Your writing is full of cliches and needs a lot of work.” What? How dare you! Oh the injustice! How dare she dismiss such greatness in one sentence! I was utterly shattered, which turned into disillusionment. I didn’t know how to take the criticism, probably because it was the first time anyone had ever been so up front with me about my writing, about the truth of it. I’d had no idea how naive I was and I wasn’t used to challenges. I was an all-rounder – I put in minimal effort and was rewarded with maximum results, so why try to improve? I was angry at first, then upset, then began to doubt myself.

I did very badly in English after that, just scraped past, until a shining light of an English teacher at age 16 gave me a moment of pure inspiration to produce something ‘real’ and the encouragement to keep it going…

Finding a voice

Replicated from my SheWrites blog, 31 January 2011.

I wrote stories all the time as a kid. They were usually fantasy, about girls with pretty names finding secret lands or unravelling hidden mysteries. I always felt as though my writing and reading habits were somewhat immature for my age, but I’d quietly plod along, churning out all sorts of stories (usually unfinished, however, but that’s another post…)

I recall my first year of high school at age 12 was incredibly difficult, as I’d gone from a very ‘alternative’ school into a Catholic girls’ school, and the transition was a struggle to say the least. I hated many of my classes, especially science, and I had few friends, finding it hard to relate to a group of girls who grew up in circumstances fairly removed from my own. I still had my stories, though, and was very excited at the prospect of those first English classes when we were asked to write a story as part of our assessment. This is my kind of thing, I thought! I excitedly wrote a story about my cat, hand-written, as word processing wasn’t the required norm back then, and because of the way I’d been taught to write I wrote in cursive script; it was messy, but I’d been taught that learning the form of the letters in their most beautiful way was more important, and that my writing would neaten up as I got older. Ms Kirkpatrick, a haggard, sour, ancient old biddy of an English teacher, who couldn’t even remember how to pronounce my name, reprimanded me harshly for that story. She was more concerned with the fact that I hadn’t ruled a margin, my writing didn’t adhere to the straight lines on the paper, and it was rather erratic. I don’t really remember what she said about the story itself but it completely shattered my confidence. I still wrote at home, and I faithfully kept the diary I’d begun at age 9 or 10, but it took until I was almost 17 to bring that faith in my writing back, thanks to a conversely wonderful English teacher who I will never forget. That too is for another post…

I found out today that I’ve been invited to write a review of a wonderful book by Kim Stagliano called ‘All I Can Handle’. I am so excited! I am yet to receive my copy, but it looks like an amazing book. It is about the author’s life bringing up three daughters with autism. I am excited not only because I find the topic most interesting, but also because I feel that this could signify my entry back into the literary world. I have been on the periphery for so long now, afraid to dip my toe in the pool of greatness, doing what the great Nelson Mandela once reminded us we do only too well: living small. My mum says this to me all the time, that I live beneath my potential, and although I know she is right I also dismiss her comments because she is my mum and everything she says is subjective.

In fact that leads me to another aspect of this discovery of a voice, a writing identity, and establishment of my place in the writing world. As she is a language teacher, I always gave my writing to my mum to read and was desperate for her feedback. It angered me that she would read my stories and then go on and on about how wonderful they were! She never gave me any constructive criticism, she would just gush about how well I wrote and what a fantastic story it was… oh, but she’d find at least half a dozen grammar and spelling or punctuation mistakes which she’d happily correct. But as for criticism of the structure, the tone, the characterisation, the syntax, no, those things were sacred; I was perfect and so was my writing. I knew this wasn’t right! But boy did I find it hard to deal with editorial interference years later… Is it still my writing if I’ve taken on board and implemented someone’s suggested changes? To what extent can someone influence my writing before it ceases to be mine? Little did I realise that no writing is mine; it was all there to begin with, I just discovered it.

The ‘tooff’ and the truth

Replicated from my SheWrites blog, 23 January 2011.

One of the first stories I remember writing was called ‘The Tooth’ or in my then-childish scrawl, ‘The Tooff’.  I think I would have been about six.  I still have the story, written in green crayon, with my own corrections in pencil a few years later.  As you can probably guess, it was about losing my first tooth.  It was a bottom tooth, and had been wobbly for some time.  Around the time, I had tried my first ever piece of chicken, having been brought up a vegetarian, and so had just discovered chicken drumsticks and eating meat off a bone.  The story, all true, went that I was sitting eating a banana during morning tea and my tooth came out and stuck in the banana.  I mistook it for a bone, or something not edible in my banana, and, being the impulsive mess-maker I was, I picked it out and threw it across the classroom!  As I looked across at my flying tooth’s trajectory, I realised what it was, but too late – plop, it fell straight into the bowl of soup that a boy in my class was eating.  Upon finishing my banana, I asked the boy if he’d found my tooth in his soup, and he showed me an empty bowl, saying he must have eaten it!  So I didn’t have anything to leave out for the tooth fairy.  My mum wrote her a note which we left on my dressing table, and lo and behold the next morning there was a shiny 50 cent piece waiting for me in its place.  After the tooth came a contribution from my granddad – ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’…

This was my first story, and it was a true story.  I didn’t know it then, but I would struggle forever with the concept of the truth in my writing.  Can you tell the truth?  Can you write about other people?  Surely even if you change their names it’s pretty obvious who you’re writing about.  What if they’re offended?  What if they sue you?  Doesn’t truth depend on perspective/perception anyway?  All these questions continue to plague me, but I realise that there isn’t a piece of writing out there that doesn’t have some sort of autobiographical element in it.  I think I’m interesting in people, interactions between them, and concepts around this are explored by way of rehashing the truth.  And after all, it’s my truth, it’s what I think is real and interesting.  I wonder though, would I get offended if someone wrote about me and I felt I was misrepresented?  Even if they changed my name so as not to identify me?  I think I might.  My most recent conclusion about how to combat this problem is to write about dead people.  The longer someone has been dead, the less possibility there is of someone getting upset about the representation.  And the more opportunity there is to make things up!  Fiction is an odd thing; on the one hand, it’s defined as ‘make believe’, yet on the other fiction writers are doing their best to make their writing ‘believable’.  So what is it, true or not?  Is all fiction true?  What is truth?  How can we establish a clear line between fiction and non-fiction?  And is there the same between truth and fairy stories?