Giving birth to squint-eyed babies, or why you should choose first readers with care
Much on my mind at present, as I get ready for a residency at Cove Park, is the nature of revision. For most novelists, particularly those of us who haven’t got a first novel onto the bookshelves yet, the first readers are our friends and family who get our work hot from the computer, or even read it over our shoulders as we type (if we’re lucky enough to have that degree of support) but that kind of first reader can be a liability. They are like the adoring aunts and uncles who hang over the buggy of your newborn.
“I think the baby squints a bit,” you say.
“No!” they chorus. “Don’t be daft, the baby is perfect! All babies do that, it’s because their lovely little eyes can’t focus properly yet.”
Writing groups are another kind of first reader. They are a bit like your local mother and toddler group. You take your baby along and compare it to the other babies, noting that yours is bigger but theirs might be more coordinated, or have more teeth, or hair, or whatever. “I think the baby squints a bit,” you say.
Half the other parents say yes, it squints like mad, and gaze fondly at their own totally cross-eyed offspring. The other half say no, it doesn’t squint at all, and pat you reassuringly before asking if their own child, which has ears like a pair of louvre doors, is perhaps in need of a bit of corrective surgery. “No,” you say, “he’s lovely as he is.”
But your doubt remains, and you ask your doctor. “Yes,” he says. “Your baby squints.” And that’s what you needed to know, because a squint can be corrected, if you acknowledge that it’s there.
Picking first readers is an important step if you really want to make it as a full time writer. I use a combination of two or three friends, writers one and all, whom I can trust to be painfully honest and complete strangers who read my work in online workshops and have no vested interest in how much my baby squints.
So when I go to Cove Park, I shall be correcting the squint in my baby … and I am grateful to all of those who acknowledged it was there.
And in the baking department? I’ve been making walnut rolls for chilly Easters.
5 Comments
Charles Lambert
22nd March 2008Yes, first readers. I don’t know what I’d do without them. Short stories get workshopped, as you know! and I don’t know what I’d do without the attention fellow zoetropers bring to their reviews. But my experience with workshopping a novel was less positive, and not because of the quality of the comments, which were always astute and well-argued. I just felt that I didn’t need that kind of reading while I was still writing. I’d rather finish the novel and then let people see it. I’ve got a catchment area of about half a dozen people with radically different tastes and approaches, interestingly not all writers but without exception avid readers, and they’re the ones I show it to. The only kind of help I get during the writing is from Giuseppe, my partner, who doesn’t read English, but gets to know the characters and events as if they were actually living (and doing) next door. A lot of what goes on in my fiction is hammered out with him over dinner, and I find it invaluable, because he’s utterly ruthless. Typical comments: ‘God, that’s banal!’ ‘Hillary would never do that!’ ‘Are you mad? Another murder!’
KAREN
22nd March 2008Great post :o)
Mr first readers, back in the day, were indeed family and friends, who all thought my baby was perfect. Imagine my surprise when I sent my MS to be critiqued professionally and it turned out that not only did baby squint, he was bald, ugly and wouldn’t stop screaming either. Actually, it confirmed what I already suspected.
I don’t show stuff to F&F now, apart from my sister whose opinion I trust, because they just can’t be impartial – either that or they’re too polite!
Those walnut rolls look yummy, by the way.
Mary Akers
27th March 2008Ah, so true, so true!
Debra Broughton
30th March 2008Well said. It’s also hard to be that kind of reader, a skill that can takes years to acquire.
Jay
19th April 2008I can’t BEAR to have people reading over my shoulder. That kind of support I can do without… but I do have one or two friends who will read stuff for me and offer opinions. I don’t have many people I trust, but I do have one writer who enjoys the same kind of fiction as I do, and one good friend who doesn’t actually read that much (by my ‘five books at once’ standards) but who will nit-pick and make me think harder about things. Then there’s a friend of the writer who has never met me and is therefore totally, 100%, impartial.
I suspect my baby squints rather more than most, but he’s still a lot of fun.