“Imagine what the view would be like if you cut down these trees.”
She smiled, she’d heard all this a dozen times before. “And here I thought the view was the trees.”
puddles of inspiration
“Puddles and mud and tiny bird footprints,
silt dusted leaves and ripples of sunlight.”
The poet felt his poetry muscles growing warm.
His daughter waited until he turned to dig out a pencil and paper before splashing through his inspiration in her red rubber boots. She smiled up at him as his eyebrows shot skywards. “You comin’ in?” she asked.
He could not deny the temptation. “Maybe I should write children’s books instead,” he said, and hopped right in.
beards of moss
The old man’s beard moss hung heavy on the trees. I almost didn’t recognize the forest at first. “What happened to you?” I asked.
The eldest tree sighed, his shoulders slumping under the weight of his regret, or maybe just the moss. “Don’t ever make fun of a wizard’s beard,” was all he would tell me.
the view from below
The little mushroom peeked around his big brother’s leg. “Is that it?”
“Yep. This is the Surface. It’s a weird place, lots of light and space, but most of it is empty because nobody likes leaving the ground. Kind of like us.”
The little mushroom sucked in his breath as a shadow flew over the sky. “What is that?”
“That’s a bird. They leave the ground whenever they like, and go soaring through all that empty space.”
“Someday I’m gonna do that,” said the little mushroom.
The eldest said nothing, hearing something in his little brother’s voice that made him think the boy might.
a creepy forest tale
The forest looked down the hill at the cabin. A curl of smoke wafted from the chimney.
“Legend has it,” said a sapling in a hushed voice, “that the human who lives there keeps a stack of CORPSES on his porch.”
The fir seedling listened, shivering with a delicious fear. “So that’s why there’s always ghosts coming out of the chimney!”
the village children’s project
Most people told them it would never work. The rest shook their heads and said nothing. “At least they are staying out of trouble,” was muttered thrice a day.
The kids ignored them and kept on working, testing ideas and calculating for every possibility. They carved grooves in the rocky surface to channel the wind and harness its power. They brought in soil to grow food on the top and in every crevice. The waves and the tides powered the engine.
When they were finished, the children invited everyone in the village to the launch. A handful of non-related adults showed: the type who liked to laugh at another person’s failure. They were disappointed.
The mammoth barge slipped into the sea, looking like any other cliff on the Bay. It puttered away under its own power, with a hundred cheering children on board, ready for adventure.
raising the moon
She climbed into the boughs of the tree, her heart hammering with each gust of wind. “Don’t look down,” she said to herself, but she didn’t have to look to know how far away the ground must be. “I can do this.”
In time she reached the highest branch. She mustered the dregs of her courage and pointed her wand to the sky, whispering the words she’d been practicing for months.
At first nothing happened. The girl clenched her eyes closed and concentrated, whispering the words again.
One by one the stars came out and peered down at her. She opened her eyes and smiled when she saw them. With another flick of her wands, she drew the moon up from the horizon.
The night creatures breathed a sigh of relief, for a moonrise fairy had come at last.
the wind that stole the pretty leaves
The goblin child sat on a tree root and pouted. “That wasn’t very nice!” he shouted at the wind.
The wind whooshed a little.
“It was greedy you know! You stole all of the pretty leaves and now there isn’t any left for anyone else!”
The wind gave a mournful whistle.
“Of course I forgive you.” The goblin child sighed. “But you have to learn to control your temper.”
the myth of the scathing review
Discouragement. It comes to us all. Few things kill creativity like discouragement can, and it shows up like a pterodactyl to snap at your latest project and fly off with its entrails hanging from its beak. There you are, wondering what happened and why you were so convinced pterodactyls were extinct all this time.
I know if I want to succeed as a writer, bad reviews are going to happen. I’m supposed to stand tough and learn from them. If I start taking it to heart and crawling under rocks now I’ll never have the guts to keep going. The tricky part is I see this best when I’m not discouraged.
The first scathing review I received came from an editor I submitted a piece of flash fiction to. This was maybe the second or third time I’d ever submitted anything. By scathing I don’t mean the editor declined to publish my work and scrawled ‘this sucks’ over my manuscript. No, they launched into a three-page tirade of everything they hated about my half page piece. When I read it, I was stunned. Not just because, hey, I liked that piece, but because the hate steamed off of their words like Pigpen’s stink waves in a Charlie Brown comic.
How did my tiny story evoke that much hate? I still don’t know. Sometimes I pull out the review and the original piece and re-read them, my sleuthing cap on and my magnifying glass in hand, trying to figure it out. You know what? I still like that piece.
I moped for about a day before I realized something in there must have touched a chord to make that editor so passionate about it. This tiny thought got me through the worst of it. You probably don’t want to hear this, but it taught me something too.
I wish I could say it taught me about plot structure or character development, that those three pages of hate were hiding useful feedback, but this is not the case. What it did teach me was that I’d prefer to get scathing reviews from my peers than an editor. It was the catalyst that made me sign up for several online critique groups. I didn’t want to give up submitting, but I didn’t want to feel humiliated like that again if I could help it.
Critique groups have changed everything. They give me extra confidence in my best stories, and they let me know the ones which need to be laid to rest. They’ve taught me that while I may enjoy writing adult fiction once in a while, it’s not where I’m at my best. I don’t get the same feeling of absolute delight writing for adults as I do for children, and it comes out in my work.
I still get the occasional poor review, but they come from a constructive place. They may still discourage me, but it doesn’t feel as devastating. I know I’m growing, and I can mark my progress now. Critique groups are safe places that have made my skin tougher, which writers need, especially when submitting and publishing. The odds are someone is going to reject our story-children, and we need to be ready for that. Even the greats get bad reviews.
Last week I received another scathing review, this time from a new-to-me critique partner. With a familiar sinking feeling I felt their hatred of my short story emanate from the screen. I felt gutted, again. This story, too, I believed in, labored over, rewrote and revised, because it was worth the effort. This reviewer eviscerated every last detail of my story, scattering its entrails to the wind. It marked the first review of this story, and I felt shattered.
A few days later, another reviewer from a different critique group sent me her review of the same story. I put off reading it. This woman is a damn good writer and she minces no words telling a fellow writer what is wrong with their story. She doesn’t care about how that makes the writer feel, she’s out to improve stories, not hold hands. In other words, she’s the best possible critique partner you can find IF you can handle it. I’ve been working with her long enough to respect her opinions and be terrified of them all at once.
At last I opened it. “Great story, well-written, made a few notes to clean up a few phrases,” she wrote. My jaw hit the floor. Positive remarks from this woman do not happen often. This is a major personal milestone and this is the exact story which received the soul-crushing review a few days previous.
Negative reviews happen, and they’re bound to discourage, but a bad review is just one person’s opinion. If the one can make a writer question their career choices, why can’t the other re-affirm them?
I went back to that scathing reviewer and tried to look at it with a greater personal distance. Truth is, I didn’t and don’t agree with most of their comments, but surely they must be an expert if they reviewed my work, right? Nope. They specialize in writing kink. Why they were reviewing children’s fiction is beyond me. So why did I put so much stock in their opinion?
Why do we, as writers, believe the worst even when we feel, deep down inside, our story is good? Argh. The stereotype of the neurotic writer. I wouldn’t let myself get away with that on paper, so you can bet I’m not going to get carried away with it in real life. Writing is fun. I’m here for the fun, the hard work, and those blissful moments of creative birth. These things come with the occasional, inevitable discouragement. The discouragement doesn’t get to take over, it gets one day. One. Day. Then we’re moving on, me and my imagination full of stories. Come with me, there’s fun to be had.
While we’re at it, why haven’t I brushed off my flash fiction piece the editor ranted about for three pages and made it into something awesome? The pterodactyls must be done with it by now…
Jennifer Shelby 