RSS

Support Means More than a Good Bra (Especially for you guys)

13 Nov

critic_cartoon

I am my own worst critic. I am so bad, in fact, that I often times talk myself into a sad stupor when I am particularly hard on something I have written. We writers tend to be that way in general. We write, we edit and then we chastise ourselves because we aren’t “better” at what we do.

On this particular subject we aren’t unlike many people who think that they can always do a better job.  This is a good thing when you consider that in expecting more from ourselves we tend to become better BUT what happens when we are too hard on ourselves? The key then is to have good support and I’m not talking an underwire bra, I mean someone who loves us enough to both support us and tell us the truth.

My spouse is the best writing support I could ask for. She tells me when I am working too much i.e. up until 3 a.m. because I just have to finish this one thing, and she reads all of my stuff and gives an honest opinion about how good or bad it may be. She is gentle (this is important because we writers have fragile egos) but firm. I know that, to some degree, I don’t have to be so hard on myself because she will come along and be honest.

This is not to say that I always agree with her right off the bat. I have had pieces that I am proud of that she has turned on its head….that’s frustrating, but in the long run I know that she cares about me and my work and won’t steer me wrong. This support is invaluable and every writer should have it.

So find your support and make sure that they know how much you appreciate them. These are the folks who will keep you writing, they will make sure that you are okay and in the end they will save you the embarrassment of turning out something that you might one day regret. Writing is generally a lone gunman kind of thing but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone all the way through it. Trust me, you need the support.

© The Writer’s Advice, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

 
 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
%d bloggers like this: