Argh, not Urbis again!

It has now been 15 days since I started my little adventure on Urbis. I was hoping to include a screen dump of my account, but the image is too small.

Anyway, I have submitted four pieces. The first was a poem, the second a short story, the third the first chapter of Tangled Threads and finally a snapshot of a slice of life from my German journal.

The stats can give you an idea how busy I have been. Over two weeks I have reviewed 85 pieces, gathering credits to read the 65 reviews I received. This does not count the different comments (44) and emails (9) I have been bouncing around. Up to now, I have spent 23068 credits.

Yes I am completely obsessed. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have not been so jazzed about my writing in a long time. Let me give you a sampling of some of the reviews on my first chapter for Tangled Threads:

My eyes started to hurt after a while of reading this but, what I read of it and will finish reading of it, I liked

Fantasy isn’t my genre, so please take that into account with this review. I liked the work; it pulled me in right away, especially like the description of his madness.

I’m impressed. I don’t usually go for fantasy but, I really enjoyed this. You’ve done a fantastic job creating very real characters and your imagery brings this world to life.

This was the first novel treatment I was able to read, from beginning to end, without stopping in over a month. It held my interest, flowed, and had no errors so glaring I felt need to stop and type endlessly before I ever finished reading. Mrs. Walla is pleased. Can you see me smiling?

Of course, not all the reviews are glowing or positive.

Some of your dialogue is a bit adverb-heavy. Let the descriptions of what is going on and what the character is actually saying show us how they’re saying something instead of having an adverb tell us so.

Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t find that the old man and his sudden dialogue had too much of a hook to draw the reader in.

This seems like an interesting story but you didn’t completly hook me. The begining was a bit bogged down by trying to figure out the langauge, like is a cycle a year, a lunar month, what?

I really just felt, for a fantasy novel, that it could use a lot more life.

Yet my favourite review comes from one pompous reviewer, who I believe likes to hear his own words. His review starts:

Let’s focus on the good here. I’m sure you’ve received enough bad reviews on this piece, and if not, you will.

Let’s start a review with a bang, huh? Ah, but wait.

I’m not going over every paragraph as there is too much to fix. I think you have good basic writing skills that you can build on. Perhaps fiction is not your forte. That’s not an insult. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Oh, thank you for sharing. But it gets better:

Perhaps you would do better writing features or essays. T.S. Eliot was a bad prose writer, although he was a great poet.

At least he stays positive, by ending with:

Do keep writing; it’s the only way I know how to improve your craft. Best of luck.

Now except for his review, I did not receive one bad review. Many of the reviewers took their time to review the piece and then offer constructive criticism like:

You need to involve more of the senses, because that helps to draw the reader into your piece.

In conversation, your characters lob dialog back and forth like throwing a softball. There are several things involved. First is that you’ve left out body language and facial expression, which comprise nearly half of our communication.

You use descriptions of “eyes” a lot, and I sort of found it distracting.

The hook is there, but it takes far too log to develop.

Of grammatical issue, you are missing punctuation, namely semicolon and commas.

What has me excited is that these reviews are providing me an objective, honest look at my works. It forces me out of my absorption of my stuff and let’s me become objective.

This brings me to a link my buddy Jason sent to me some time ago. It is a series of writer’s tools written by Roy Peter Clark. One of his last tools is on Learn from Criticism. He says:

The right frame of mind can transform criticism that is nasty, petty, insincere, biased, even profane, into gold.

And the trick is:

• Do not fall into the trap of arguing about matters of taste.
• Do not, as a reflex, defend your work against negative criticism.
• Explain to your critic what you were attempting to do.
• Transform arguments into conversations.

With all the excitement generated by some of the reviews, these have been words of gold for me. A couple of times I read a review and went: “Don’t you get it?” But then I use these four points in response. And it has done me well.

The past 15 days have been quite a journey. It has validated that I have a voice, albeit one that needs work. But based on the reaction from people I do not know, people who are not even my target audience, my stuff isn’t crap. The 65 reviews and counting have reminded me to have confidence in my abilities. It has been a while since I believed in myself. It’s time to start believing in my ability once again. Thing is, at times, it isn't easy.