Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Long time no chat... or so it seems. hehe

I don't know how all you bloggers do it. I have a terrible time keeping up with this thing. I have so much on my plate right now that I don't seem to have time.

However, I wanted to toss out something here. Lately, I've noticed some negative reviews. It got me to thinking. When someone trashes a story, that doesn't mean that that story isn't any good, it just means that one person didn't like it. We all have different tastes and styles. Some love mystery's while others hate them. Whose right? Both. I really believe that some times our mood plays a big part in whether or not we like something. For example, my daughter kept trying to get me to watch a certain movie. I tried, but hated it. I couldn't even get past the first ten minutes. Several people kept asking me if I'd seen such an such a movie. I finally broke down and rented it again. I loved it! And yet it was the same movie. So what had changed? After much contemplation, I ascertained that it was the mood I was in. It was the same way with the movie, Persuasion, written by Jane Austen. By the way, for those of you who don't know this about me, I'm a huge Jane Austen fan. Anyway, the first time I watched that movie, I thought it was really boring and dumb. Then one day when I was super bored and in the mood for a renaissance movie. The past week, I'd watch all four versions of Pride and Prejudice, both versions of Sense and Sensibility, both versions of Emma, Mansfield Park, and I can't think of the name of the other Jane Austen movie, but I'd watched it too. Because I'd seen all of the above about twenty times and had only seen Persuasion once, I decided to watch it again. To my amazement, I absolutely loved it and it has become one of my favorites. So, why am I telling you all of this? Because I really believe that sometimes mood has something to do with whether or not we like something. Not always, of course, but it can play a huge factor. When I sit down to read a book and I find it boring or monotonous, I put it aside for awhile and find something else to read. Sometimes I go back to it and try reading it again. If this goes on several times then I know it is a book that is not for me, or just a really boring story.

Recently I suggested that a dear friend read what I deemed a fantastic story. I just knew she would love it. When she wrote me and told that she thought it was just okay, I was stunned to say the least. She and I have the same taste in stories. But this time, she saw things in it that I didn't. It got me to wondering if she really didn't like it, or if perhaps she read it with her editor's cap on and not her reader's cap. What I mean by that is, sometimes, we as writers, read in an editor's mode. We pick out things that we would have never noticed when we were just readers. However, once we learned the rules and guidelines of writing, it caused a lot of us to now see things in the stories that we would have never noticed before. Like head-hopping, or poor sentence structure, or mistakes etc. Where as before, we just read and the only thing we judged it by was whether or not we liked the story or not. After talking to her, I realized that it just wasn't her flavor of tea. Did that mean that the story was bad? Was she right and I was wrong? No way! It just means that you have two people with two different tastes.

So, if anyone has been hurt by a bad review, or even some not-so-positive comments, take heart. It's just one person's opinion. Now, if twenty out of twenty-five people don't like it, then maybe you need to find out what you're doing wrong and work on perfecting your craft. But, if you get one or two bad reviews and ten great reviews, chalk it up to that that person either didn't care for it because it wasn't their type of story, or the mood there were in that day didn't fit your particular story. It doesn't mean that you wrote a mooey-poopey novel. It just means that it was one person's opinion. It's kinda like... One person loves liver and onions. I myself gag just smelling it. I heave every time. Does that mean that the person who loves it is right and I'm wrong? Nope! It means they liked it and I didn't. So it is with our novels.

So, when you get a negative review, ask God if there is something you need to work on, or if the person was just having a bad hair day, or if your story just wasn't their type of book. But most of all~~~ keep writing.

Until next time....

See ya ~~~~~~
Debra

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