That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.-Nietsche

Feedback. What’s not to like?

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard, Newsweek, 1985

Seriously. It’s good. I like feedback. Well, most of it. Good criticism falls into the ‘hurts so good’ category, because once I make the fix I will have a Much Stronger Book.

Revisions are my friend. Revisions make the story stronger. I like need revisions.I confess that it is disheartening to see the gap between what I intended to say and how it came across to the reader. But that’s not the reader’s problem.

If I didn’t hit the mark, I need to improve my aim.  I was trying to write a story that relied a lot more on showing emotion through the characters’ body language, rather than explicitly stating what they were feeling, but I need to work on that some more.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – wholeheartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing, 1916

Now I have to figure out when to schedule the revisions that I need to do on Geoff and Lia’s story. I want to finish the first smooth draft of the story I’m working on before I go back to rewriting this one.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966

Each story I write is going to make me a better writer because I am going to go through the revision notes and improve my writing as a result.