Since the last two days I’ve been dealing with more technical stuff, I decided to get on here and rant today. I roam the internet a lot and I talk to a lot of writers on forums. So I came across one who posts works and generally gets good feedback (I'm not telling where). However, the one complaint I had was that there was no growth in his writing over the years and all his work had the same exact pattern! His plot was very predictable because he didn’t change it up. All his works went through the same exact plots and generally speaking, a writer needs to know when they lack originality in their short fiction or whatever. I started to tell him this until I noticed at one of the top of his posts that he was fussing about a flame he got that was in the guise of a critique… So I went and found the comment and while the reader made clear he enjoys the style and writing, he pointed out that the writer’s work had become stagnant (like I had noticed), and that it was becoming predictable and was lacking growth. You would think these are the things the writer wants to know. But instead I check his profile and the writer goes on a rant about having a degree and teaching writing in school and being published by a less than credible publisher called Publish America (for those who have no idea how bad that is go to this link).
I’m making two points here. One is that as a writer, you have to have thick skin and that sometimes you have to hear the hard truths about your work in order to grow. As writers we get too attached to our work and need someone else to see it for us. The reason we want to get defensive is because our work is an extension of us, but it’s not personal. All critique, even hateful, is for and can be used for improvement and a writer can’t be too arrogant to hear it.
My next point is that if you can’t tell a good story, no one gives a damn whether you got a degree or not. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m in college. I’m an advocate for pursuing higher learning. But a college degree doesn’t make a good writer though it can help. My college experience and learning has helped me loads in my writing, but some things college professors can’t teach and has to be learned through years of searching forums, research, practice, trial and error, rewriting entire manuscripts, and switching everything up when something's not working. This list goes on forever. It is true that many writers have English degrees though, but not all. Some of the best didn’t go to college at all, but studied the art form. Don’t let a degree get to your head. Don't let anyone tell you you have to major in English of creative writing to be a good writer. There's no right or wrong way.
So I just had to rant on that. I’ll post something more helpful tomorrow.
P.S. Publish America is not a legit publisher. Real writers and people who have done their research will laugh in your face. I’ll make a post on it later, but please go to that link in this post.
