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Are you one of those people who are very hard on themselves? I know I am, and it gets to the point where it stops me from working at my best. John Yeoman is talking directly to us when he gives us six reasons why maybe our story isn’t as bad as we tell ourselves. Go on over to Writer’s Village for a little pick-me-up.
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6 Surprising Reasons Why Your Story Is Better Than You Think
by John Yeoman
June 17, 2016
Have you ever tumbled into a trough of writing despair? “My stories are no good,” you say. “I’m a hopeless writer, witless and inept.” Baloney. Everybody is a bad writer – at least, in their first drafts.
More to the point, your self-opinion is wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Your stories – and your writing skills – are probably a lot better than you think. Why? Let me count the reasons, all six of them.
1. You love your story – or something about the story.
If you don’t love it, nobody else will. Trash it. But if you do love it, there’s something lovable in it – which can be developed.
Maybe it’s a character.
Dorothy Sayers fell in love with her grandee sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. Was he Sayers’ imaginary son or lover? Only Freud could say.
No matter. Her passion drove her to write 15 classic Wimsey novels plus five story collections.
Or maybe it’s a world.
Each of Sayers’ stories is a microcosm of her social world, an age when everyone in Britain had servants. If you didn’t, you were nobody. She was tacitly in love, not just with Wimsey, but with a between-wars golden age now lost to us.
(Some might say, well lost. It was no ‘golden age’ for the servants in those days.)
Build on that passion. It’s too strong to dismiss. Soon you’ll have a story – even a novel – that other readers will fall in love with too.
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