Help Me, Help You, Help Me

As I have mentioned before a good friend of mine started to venture into the writing world around the same time I did.  Like me, he had been sitting on some great ideas for sometime and finally worked up the confidence to jump in and start writing.

We had a really great chat a few months back just talking about how we got started.  So one day when we were finalizing the plans for Matt and his wife to come babysit my kids I asked him how the writing was going.

I can't quote him directly but the gist of it was it wasn't going well and he hadn't really committed much time to it lately.

He mentioned a lot of distractions but I had a feeling he was letting himself be distracted from writing for reasons he wasn't really telling me.  I thought this because everything he was telling me I had heard myself say before to others.  I had been in a bit of a slump and looking back now I realized it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't really think I was doing such a great job writing and I was feeling a little down on myself.

I could see all this mirrored in my dear friend.

So being the bossy, domineering, and loving person that I am, I talked him into having a bit of a working session with me.  I told him we could just talk it out.  I was by no means an expert but sometimes if you just start saying stuff out loud to other people it starts thought processes you might not have kicked off by yourself.

Matt's story is a short sci-fi story set in the future.  So I was asking a lot of questions about his world and the people of that time period in general.  He was worrying that his characters didn't seem real and their interactions with each other were forced and unnatural.  My hope, in asking the questions I did, was that it would help him better understand his characters and the world in which they live so he might better understand why people might react they way they do.

He had great answers for everything I threw at him.  So it was obvious to me that background wasn't really his issue.

Matt was telling me was having a hard time with dialog, so I sent him a snippet of some dialog I had been working on that evening.

Let me just take a second to highlight that last point a bit.  I sent him a snippet... of my book... that no one else has ever seen snippets of before...

I jokingly told him to feel special all the while I was sitting on the edge of my seat to see what he might have to say about what I wrote.

Here I was trying to help him with dialog and he could be reading mine thinking, this is worse than mine, she can't help me!

Matt was uncharacteristically quite for a minute or two, I started chewing on my nails.  He did respond back but he just continued along with the conversation without mentioning my snippet!

We were doing all this over a chat so its very possible that he was in his own manuscript when I typed that to him and he just missed it.  My brain, however,  jumped right to the worst case scenario.  He must be thinking it is awful.

I took a deep calming breath and reminded myself that tonight was not about me.  I was determined to get his butt back in the writing chair if I had to drive over to his house and tie him to it.

We continued on back and forth for a bit longer when I finally said, ok just send me something, show me something you think is just utter crap and I will tell you what I think.

Matt and I have been friends for quite some time, we were once co-workers and we have collaborated on many, many projects in the past.  It takes an insane amount of courage to send someone a chunk of your work if you love it, much more so if you hate it.  I want to say that I was honored that Matt felt comfortable enough to show me something he felt was so horrible it made him want to stop writing all together.

He sent me about 4 pages of typed material via drop box and I set off to read it.

After a few (very intense for Matt, I'm sure) minutes I came back to tell him what I thought.  I told him what I truly felt about it.  I didn't think he was far off from the story he wanted to tell.

I think I surprised him.  They say writers are their own worst critics and I think that was true for Matt.  It's probably true for me too but we'll see.

I'm not a big sci-fi reader but I do enjoy them from time to time.  I really enjoyed what I had read, I was able to follow all the sci-fi stuff because the context was well done and I genuinely wanted to know what happened to this guy after the scene I was given came to a close.  That's hard to do in just a few paragraphs.

Matt had prefaced the whole thing with what he felt was wrong with it.  His character feels like he isn't  having enough of a reaction to the news he is given and the dialog felt, for lack of a better word, stiff.

I thought his character was having a reaction, but I could see what Matt was talking about.  He wanted him to have a more intense reaction.

With Matt's permission I added about 20 words to a few paragraphs of his work and showed him with a few tweaks you can convey to the reader a more intense reaction without rewriting the entire conversation.

I think he liked what I had to show him, it also proved to him that he really wasn't that far away.

All this led to a conversation about the Show Don't Tell Rule in writing.  Which is all I ended up adding when I threw in a few extra words.

This made me feel empowered to show Matt another snippet from my own writing where I am writing about my own character's reaction to something someone else said to her.

This time Matt did comment on it and he liked it, he really, really liked it!

His praise on my 2 small paragraph snippet sent me over the moon!

The whole conversation was just about an hour and I think it left us both feeling pretty jazzed up to do some more writing.  In my opinion if that session did nothing more than motivate my friend, it was an hour well spent.

Matt, thanks for having a working session with me.  We should be having those check ins every so often.  Also thanks for letting me devote an entire blog entry to you and our conversation.  If you're up for it, talk about what you've been up to since that night in the comments.

I have been promised that I will get to read his story when he's done!  Yay, I can't wait!!!!