The writers' version of spinach in your teeth
On learning to ask for help so others can help you grow
I’ve been writing my entire life, but nobody ever saw my first stories. I wrote them in notebooks that I hid under my clothes and later burned. I wrote poetry, short stories, and even a 400,000 word saga that was a thinly-veiled journal, all without thought of an audience.
Writing was private, a way to express myself despite living in a society that didn’t really afford me many other options to do so. Even my best friends didn’t get to read my stories.
And so, for many years, I never got the kind of robust feedback from a writers’ community that would have helped me hone my craft. In fact, until I took a college class on essay writing, I’d never actually had peer feedback or critique.
The first time I got peer feedback, I was mortified. A room of twenty people pointed out things that I felt I should have caught, things that were painfully obvious. Mixing past and present tense. Clunky dialogue tags (people exclaimed, shouted, sighed, whispered or grunted things every two lines).
Peer feedback is the writers’ version of someone telling you that you have spinach in your teeth or a bloodstain on your pants. You’re embarrassed, yes, but also so grateful you could cry. (You probably cry anyway).
Of course it takes courage and resilience to get your work published, to share your ideas with a wide audience. But I’d argue it takes even more to ask for help and feedback from friends and peers.
For many years I stubbornly believed that I should be able to do this alone, that writing is a private, lonely endeavor, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You only need to read the Acknowledgements section of any book to know that no writer, no person, ever succeeds alone. And yet I never really asked even my friends for help, not out of pride, but out of the fear of embarrassment.
I recently had the help of a marvelous team of women in setting up my website and starting a series of videograms on writing craft. They patiently taught me things I wish I’d known ten years ago, and walked me through video-editing technology without judging me for not already knowing how to do what billions of other humans have already figured out. I’m also learning to reach out to my friends to ask for help, and they’ve responded readily with suggestions for improvement, design advice and introductions to people they know. One of them, a fellow writer, even organized a book event in San Francisco, complete with cocktail menus themed to match Driving by Starlight.
A writer’s life doesn’t have to be difficult or lonely, as long as you can make it past the hurdle of being vulnerable enough to let other people help you grow. Or, in those exquisite words from Yuri on Ice, “There’s a place you just can’t reach, unless you have a dream too large to bear alone.”