Saturday, October 16, 2010

Lords and Idiots...

"Herroille ja hulluille ei pidä näyttää keskeneräistä työtä."

There is a Finnish saying: "Unfinished work shouldn't be shown to lords and idiots". Don't share your work with anyone. Don't speak anything about it. The critique will kill your enthusiasm, and you need it to finish the work. It is amazing how little is needed to kill the spark, just a few negative words, even when they are not meant that way, can do the job.
“If there was only one tip I could pass on to new fiction writers, it would be this: Don’t go around blabbing about your book! There is a magic, an energy, an intensity that needs to go into your creative work, not into telling people about it.”
- Aaron Elkins
P.S. The Writer Magazine is having an open doors week, and I feel like a kid in a candy store :-D
I have already read a lot of interesting things, and I've been there only for an hour or so :-D
I especially liked the Dean R. Koonz interview... he is one of my author ideals ;-)

"From the age of 15 until I was 35, I read on average 200 novels a year"
- Dean R. Koonz

1 comment:

Helena said...

The two exception I've made to the "don't read the unfinished book" rule are my friends Ann and Rich. They read my book The Compass Master in chunks as I wrote it and offered me only extremely minor critiques but huge waterfalls of praise. I had been so discouraged that I needed their enthusiasm to keep going.

On the other hand, several years ago I gave a finished manuscript to a sister to read and she was ruthlessly cruel in her review of it. Only later did I see (and several people confirmed) that she was so jealous of my writing ability she wanted to tear me down. Eventually I got over it, but for a long time my confidence was badly shaken. On the bright side and for completely different reasons, we're no longer on speaking terms.