This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
By Anna Bell
Being an author is a dream job and I know that I’m extremely lucky to live the dream and do it full-time Yet, as with any job, there are bad bits. Here are what I think are the worst bits. Would you agree?
Everyone has an opinion on your writing. Reading a review of your work can be soul destroying at times. It’s one thing to have a few people that you work with think you’re not very good at your job but it’s quite another having some person – who you will probably never meet – telling the world that your work is clichéd or is lacking in storyline. Whilst I’ve grown thicker skin since I started writing, it’s still not nice to read.
You’ll never be able to enjoy a book in the same way again. Yes, you’ll be able to love books, but those ones that you adore will make you doubt your own writing. I recently read a book, which was written so well; the words were perfectly crafted and there were twists that I hadn’t seen coming. I finished the book having absolutely loved it but it made me feel downhearted as I couldn’t imagine ever writing anything as good.
It’s all down to you. Whilst an editor or an agent can give you advice and steering on your novels, they can’t write it for you. You are the only person that can write your book and that can be a scary thought. You might get writer’s block or you might get ill – and there’s no one that can fill in for you. It’s something that really hit home this year when I was on maternity leave and I had to squeeze my work in to the tiniest amount of hours.
You get very protective of your little baby. The fact that you write the book means it becomes your precious little baby and therefore it’s hard to give up control and make changes that are suggested. When you spend so much time fixating over certain paragraphs and tweaking and crafting them, it’s difficult when your editor says that it doesn’t work or that it should be omitted.
You become fixated on particular words or phrases. I spent ages the other day trying to work out whether it sounded better that my character had goosebumps rather than goose pimples. I turned to Twitter for help for that and it was suggested that goosebumps sounded more romantic. Considering my last book was 96,000 words, spending 15 minutes deciding on one particular word can be quite painstaking.
You can’t always see your mistakes. We’ve all read published books that have awful typo howlers that make you wonder what the author, editors and proofreaders were thinking when they read the edits of the books. As an author, by the time you send a manuscript away to your editor you’ve already edited numerous times yourself, and then you have to tinker with it again in the line edit, the copy edit and then again as a page proof. The trouble is always that you know the book so well it’s hard to read the actual words and catch those pesky typos.
What do you think? What are the bad bits when you’re an author?