Your Writing Life – Are You Too Dependent on Input From Other People?

Dec 15, 2008 by Lucia Zimmitti

If you’ve made it past your teens, you’ve learned that denial doesn’t work in relationships. Pretending to be someone you’re not will only catch up with you in a complicated, unpleasant way at some point. The same holds true for your relationship with your writing self. Telling yourself you have a different writing personality than you actually do will only slow you down and make you less efficient and more frustrated when you sit down at the desk. In this, the fifth and final installment of the writing temperament discussion, we look at the writer who is overly dependent on outside feedback.

The Tofu Artist (a.k.a. The Feedback-Dependent Writer)

Tofu takes on the flavor of whatever is in the skillet along with it. So, in a sense, tofu doesn’t have a strong flavor of its own; it only borrows the flavors of the ingredients around it.

That’s all well and good for tofu, but you, dear writer, are not tofu.

A polar opposite of the Island (the type of writer who decides s/he never, ever needs anyone’s help in getting published), the Tofu Artist is overly dependent on others. She doesn’t have a clear enough vision of her own work and waits for others to crystallize things for her. She is far too willing to drastically alter her work based on someone else’s feedback. She doesn’t even truly know what kinds of things she wants to write, but decides she’ll write whatever the market currently dictates.

(It obviously makes sense to have an awareness of the market so you’re not sending your book/proposal to completely irrelevant agents/editors, but if you try to write what is “hot” right now, you’ll write yourself into a corner, because it may be lukewarm or even cold by the time your draft is done and shopped around. Also, your lack of artistic conviction will show on the page. Write what moves and compels you first; figure out how it fits into the marketplace later.)

Don’t indiscriminately incorporate feedback into your work. Quiet outside advice until you can hear your own. Then make decisions about which pieces of advice resonate for you and which feel way off base. Don’t be afraid to toss the input that strikes you as unhelpful. Taste in writing is highly subjective, without concrete rights and wrongs. And if you don’t believe that you have the elusive answer or the magic key, then why would you grant that power to someone else?

One of your most valuable tools is your unique writing voice. If you only strive to take on the flavor that others suggest, you’ll never develop your own. And creating your own voice means incorporating suggestions that make sense to you and putting aside the ones that don’t (no matter who they come from).

Remember: you own your writing. Don’t reject your own instincts and write a certain way just to appease others. Develop and hold onto your artistic vision. Balance suggestions from others with what you believe is best for your work. (Yes, writing – like life – is often all about balance.) Reject advice that doesn’t complement your personal vision.

Benefit of this temperament: If you are a tofu artist, you are spared the grueling decisions (complete with hair-pulling and hand-wringing) you see so many other writers grappling with. Since other people will give you that direction you seek, you can zip through first drafts much more quickly than other writers and then just work on incorporating what your critique group tells you.

Cost of this temperament: If your critique group includes more than two people (and to be the most effective, it should), what do you do when three people have three very different opinions on your work? How can you defer to them all? You can’t, of course, and this is where learning how to rely on your own instincts (you have them, even if you haven’t been paying attention) comes in. Then you can sift through the feedback and organize it in your own hierarchy.

The good news is that, even if you’re the staunchest of Tofu Artists, you can reshape your mindset and your habits so that you can hop off the treadmill and join the actual race. Nurture your own sense of intuition (even though you need outside feedback, learn to value your intuition above others’). Start to trust that inner voice you’ve been squeezing to the margins. Writing is a string of thousands of executive decisions. Practice making those decisions on your own and living with the results for a while, before you hand the piece off for critique.

(The other four writing temperaments (discussed in separate articles) are:

~Sir Starts-a-lot

~The Perfectionist

~Fool for a Deadline

~The Island.)

To discover more ways to make your writing habit more efficient, satisfying and fun visit ManuscriptRx and sign up for “Write Through It,” a free, monthly e-newsletter newsletter that offers practical writing advice and anecdotal wisdom.

Lucia Zimmitti, a writing coach and independent editor, is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Her fiction and poetry have been published in various national literary journals, and she has taught writing at the high school and college levels.