Keep at it.

She told me the editor made her cry.

This is not a joke, and not an amalgamation-type person, but I'm obfuscating and declarificating her identity because I don't want to identify her. She has a career in publishing now. But she nearly didn't.

She sought out a well known publishing individual at a conference and asked for that person's opinion, and the person told her flat-out that her work was awful and would never get her anywhere, and she should stop. This person told me that she started to cry, and she never wrote again.

I'm writing this post because she's not alone.

Person #2 showed her work to a writer she greatly admired. That writer brushed her off, said her work was amateurish and clumsy, and she shouldn't keep writing.

Person #3 went into a conference and chose her conference track specifically to interact with one individual. That individual couldn't make it at the last minute, so the conference assigned her to someone else, and that individual trashed her work, called it juvenile, said no one reads that kind of stuff, and told her to stop writing.

Are you mad yet? Because I'm mad.

Person #2 kept going and is doing great. Person #3 stopped writing for two years and then one day woke up with a character who demanded to be written. She's now published a series starring that character. Person #1 works in publishing but is not herself a writer. They'll all be okay.

Some people won't be.

If someone has derailed your work, I want you to step back and take a deep breath, and I want you to consider picking it up again. Maybe not that story. Maybe it will be the next story. But you have a voice, and I want to make sure no one silences it. Keep speaking. Keep writing. Advocate for yourself. Learn everything you can.

And keep this in mind: someone who attacks you for not being good enough is saying more about herself than she is about you.

Get up. Keep going. Gird yourself and prepare to work harder.

If you are the person others come to for advice, here's my advice for you: find the good. You don't know how much effort it took this fledgling writer to approach you and ask for help; hold that manuscript like an egg, and breathe gently. Give a few suggestions that are encouragement rather than detraction.

Is the writing stilted? "Keep at it. Sometime, when you're home alone, read it out loud to yourself and listen to your own rhythm. I think that's really going to help your prose sing."

Is the dialogue trite? "Keep at it. When these guys talk to each other, try to step back and make each of them say things in a slightly different way. Try to make it so if you pulled this one line out of the whole book, the reader would still know who was speaking."

Is the idea overdone? "Keep at it. I like this story, but I suspect you could do a lot more with this idea. Try turning it inside-out and maybe questioning some of the things you assume. Throw out your first and second ideas and try the third one instead. Because there's a lot of fertile ground you could cover here, and I'd love to see what you can do with it."

See the thread? Ask for more. When someone is fragile, rather than criticizing, show them how to go for the gold.

Ask them for more. I want to see more depth here. I want to see more time transitioning between scenes. I want to see more description of the surroundings. I want to feel more of what this character is feeling.

Ask for more. You'll get it. We're writers, and we hunger to create. Sometimes we just need better direction and a little guidance for the journey.

Listen. Listen.

In exchange for tuition to get my MA in English, I tutored at the college's writing center. Tutoring is a bit like editing, and I discovered I loved it. Every day I'd show up for three hours. If no students came, I was free to work on my coursework or my own writing. When students showed up with papers, I would read their essays with them, point out mistakes in grammar or spelling, make sure they addressed the question, and suggest areas for improvement.

Over time, I picked up "regulars," and I got to know their quirks. One in particular was a young man battling dyslexia, and if I had no other students waiting, we would talk after his essay review. He had a difficult home life.

One afternoon he brought me the second version of an essay about "a vivid experience." He'd attended a sporting event locally, which I understood to be one of the rare ways he connected with his father. While there, the action on the field had gone terribly wrong, resulting in the death of one of the spectators. My student had seen it happen.

We went over his essay, taking care to read it aloud for sound, rearranging the paragraphs for impact ("You'll want to delay saying she died until afterward, to raise the tension") and experimenting with different words that better fit the description.

He said to me, "This is so tough."

I shrugged. "It is, but you have something important to say, and I want to make sure you know how to say it the best you possibly can. Like in this paragraph, where just by inserting a line of dialogue, you draw us into the story a little more."

I looked up and the kid was staring right at me, his mouth trembling, his eyes shining. Tears.

I stiffened. "What's wrong?"

He swallowed. "You really think I have something important to say?"

And there I sat with this college freshman, a guy who worked hard for every word he wrote and who could hardly talk to his family except about a sport that had left him traumatized, and I realized he'd made it through thirteen years of schooling without anyone telling him he had something worth saying.

Why do we teach people to write except that we think they have something important to say? Why was I the first person in this young man's entire life to make sure he knew his perspective was important?

You're writers: you want to tell your stories. For Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate, give yourself the gift of believing you have something important to say. Give your message the gift of saying it as well as you can. That's why you're reading blogs about getting published. Believe in yourself. In the end, the only reason writers persevere against the odds (and the rejection and the critique and the blocks…) is that we believe our stories are worth telling.

And then pass along the gift -- the gift of making sure those around you know they've got something worth saying -- because everyone has a story, whether they're writers or just human beings living their daily lives. Give the gift of listening, the gift of affirming, the gift of letting others know their voices should be heard.

(This is a repost from 12/2010.)