Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Diary of an aspiring writer – Less is more


It has been a while since my last diary entry but I have still been posting a story each week as I promised at New Year.

I am afraid I now need to break that resolution but I am happy to do it, not because I can’t keep to it, but because I feel I am short changing my readers if I do.

One of the most important pieces of feedback that I have received from The Telegraph Creative Writing group is that they all have this image of me as a mother and career women who rushes around trying to do everything. By this they meant that a lot of my stories have a good start point but peter off or end abruptly. To try and use this feedback, this month I slowed down, rewrote the story and tried “showing” the end rather than “telling” it. The feedback I got was so much better.

The last two weeks I have posted extremely short stories to my blog just to keep to my resolution. I have not been working on editing the novel which I had hoped to have finished by the end of March and I am a little behind in my course. I have not worked on anything new that I could look at publishing and all I have been concerned about is hits to my blog. These increase every time I post a story.

So I am going to reassess, work on the novel, finish the course and try to create something that people will feel satisfied with. This process is all about learning and I think this has been a valuable lesson.

So for those of you out there who read my stories they will still keep coming, just less frequently. Hopefully this will mean the first few chapters of the book will be ready sooner and I will post them for you all to enjoy.

 

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