Protect Your Work!

This is a great post by Diana Peterfreund on her blog. She gives out some wise and terrific writing advice - and her first book Secret Society Girl was pretty terrific, too. The sequel, Under the Rose, just came out last month.

I love her latest from Thursday, July 19th - Protect the Work! That's YOUR work - your writing, your time, your ideas, your voice, your style, your strengths, your passion.

Here's a snippet that really resonated with me because this is an issue that's been on my mind a LOT the past few months as I keep rewriting to please everyone else or to *fix* whatever is supposedly wrong with my manuscripts.


". . . Just because someone didn't like a particular aspect of your book doesn't mean you did it poorly. Nor does it mean it's your job to fix that aspect. It's their problem. I read on a blog the other day about a speech that writer James Rollins gave at Thrillerfest (pardon the hearsay, but the lesson is there, even in parable form): "He'd read the reviews for his first book and noticed that many of them commented on lack of characterization. So he was trying to work on the characterization. He submitted the manuscript to the editor, who saw some of the characterization attempts and asked him what he was doing. He told her, and she said that his great strength was making a book a page turner and to stop worrying about what the reviewers were finding wrong." That's protecting the work. Do what you do best. What one person hates about your work will be another person's favorite part. Don't try to be all things to all people, or you won't please anyone."


Read the whole post - it's wonderful.