Unsolicited Advice

Is it wrong to really, really hate it?  It is the one thing that has made me regret telling people about writing.  It annoys me so much.

When I first started writing, a friend at work gave me her (unwanted) opinions on things and even went as far as to criticise my methods.  When she’s never even written so much as a short story – heck even a blog post - let alone completed and published a novel.

There’s another friend who I thought understood me a little bit better and I ranted to him about the above friend.  Including some version of the phrase, “is she a published author?  No!  When she is maybe then she can give me advice!”  He went on and on then offering to put me in touch with a published author he knows – who writes completely out of the genre I want to write in.

He kept recommending books I should buy – just because his degree is in Creative Writing – and all sorts of other stuff, generally bugging the crap out of me.

He did go quiet for a while, but the other day I made the mistake of mentioning that I’d spent the weekend writing.  He asked me how it was going and then proceeded to lecture me about characterisation and the importance of back story.  Which I know.  It really pissed me off.  He was so high and mighty and preachy, as if I know nothing.  I just replied with, “I know.  I do a lot of pre-writing.”  And nothing more.  He knew he’d annoyed me, I got a “Lol… sorry” in response.

I don’t mind talking about writing, I love it in fact.  And I’m interested in hearing other people’s methods, I like to know what works for other people.  That’s why I read other writers blogs.  What I don’t like, is being told what to do!  If he’d even just prefaced his lecture with a “what I like to do is…”  Then it might have annoyed me less.

So, how do other people deal with people telling you how you should do things?  What do you say to people who give you advice you don’t want?  I’m guessing, “Piss off you insufferable know-it-all!” isn’t generally considered very polite…

Shhhhh

Since when have libraries been noisy?  I went to the local one lunchtime to try and get a bit of writing done and it amazed me how loud it was there.  And it was mainly the staff!  It annoyed me actually.  Maybe I need a change of day job.  I can see myself prowling the aisles aggressively “shhh”-ing people who dare to disturb my quiet.

Ideas VS Decisions

I’m getting myself all tied up in a knot again over where I’m going with my WIP (I should really give it a name but I quite like calling it that, makes it sound like I’ve actually written something).  I keep getting more and more ideas and I’m really not sure which of them to follow.

I need someone I can bounce my ideas off really.  I’ve tried asking my mum what she thinks of a couple of things but she just tends to agree with me or tell me what she thinks I want to hear, without giving me anything constructive.  The one person who I think would actually be good to run ideas past, I don’t want to because we talked a while back about writing a book together and I don’t want to remind her of that.

I really need to stop book shopping too.  For a start I haven’t got time to read as much as I normally do now that I’m trying to do some writing of my own.  Secondly, every idea I’ve had that I think is great and a bit different I keep finding books where someones done it first.  Sort of.  Usually just vaguely but enough to put a dampener on me thinking I had something special.

No one has done all of my ideas rolled into one though and I still think they’re really good – even if I am getting more than slightly confused by all the different directions I could go.  I really want to tell this story, I think it has a lot of potential and that’s all that matters.  I’m writing it mainly for me anyway.  Because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and to prove to myself that I can.

Kaput

I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.  Whenever I come up with an idea and feel like I’ve got one aspect of the story nailed, something else falls to pieces.  I’ve decided which of my endings I like best now, but that’s made the beginning completely unravel.

Self doubt has set in – you know the thing… Why am I bothering?  It’s not as if I’ll write anything good.  Someone else is bound to have done my story before and better.  Etc

I think what I really need to do is get started.  Actually do some writing before I beat myself up completely and talk myself out of even trying but now that I’ve broken my beginning and lost all sense of my male lead I can’t really do that.

So I am searching the net for pictures that look like the images I have of my characters in my head and I’m going to work on character development and world building for a while.  Let my muse ponder plot undisturbed for a little while and see if she can fix the beginning for me.

Foiled

I found a perfect book for researching criminal investigation methods and was just about to buy it when I saw that it’s only applicable to the US.  That’s a bummer as it would have been really helpful.  I’ve been hunting around to try and find a British equivalent but the only things I’ve found that have even come close aren’t readily available and the only copies I’ve seen are being sold at extortionate prices.

Why I keep things to myself

I asked a friend if she’d get me some index cards while she was out at lunch because I want to use them to help me plot and I got mocked.

She thinks that my deciding to write a novel is going to be a bit like when I decided I was going to start painting.  I think she’s wrong because I was only really painting to prove a point (a colleague scanned one of his watercolour paintings, printed it out and pinned it up on the office wall – I was going to do the same to show what a knob like thing that was to do – and mine was obviously going to be better!)

I was asked, “why don’t you just start writing?”  Umm, because if I did then it would be exactly like when I decided I was going to take up painting and I would quit after about 10 pages when I didn’t have a clue what was happening next.