I remember my first fiction writing teacher telling me, "I think this story is great for a first time fiction writer." I put it in quotes even though I don't remember what she said verbatim. Dr. Rita Carey. Thanks for that. It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time.
Even at the time, I knew it needed a lot of improvement, but I didn't know how to make it better. The foreshadowing was too obvious, and the dialogue was unrealistic. As Ira Glass mentions, I could see that it wasn't great, but I didn't know what to do to make it better. Dr. Carey knew what to tell me to give me hope. Her words could be summed up as: "Good start."
There's so much room for improvement, and if you keep trying, you'll get there. I had been reading great writing for years. Books that had been written, revised, edited, published and then purchased by different readers for decades. How could I possibly expect my first attempt at writing fiction to compare?
That's why Dr. Carey was the teacher. Some of the other students in the class weren't as constructive with their criticism. I remember one fellow classmate writing on my story, "Overall your writing is quite pedestrian." I think he was bitter because I had given him some not-so-constructive criticism as well. Let's face it, I wasn't qualified to be a teacher either. But discouraging words can also be a sense of encouragement if you look at it right. I cut his comments out of the paper and pasted them into my writing notebook as a reminder.
We all start somewhere. And as we continue practicing, what we produce comes closer and closer to what we know is great.
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