No more helping friends

My real passion is fiction writing, but I earn my living as a technical writer. It pays well, I do enjoy it, and I’m good at it. I have feedback from clients, such as:

• I just wanted to thank you for the time you spent working on these documents for us. I appreciate your attention to detail in what you have provided.
• Thank you so much for the work you did for us. Your suggestions and advice were invaluable in giving us a professional product for the market.
• We really appreciate the attention to detail in the editing work you did for us, and love that you made all our manuals and other documentation read so much better.

I have also done some paid editing work of fiction written by strangers who have contacted me through my website. Their feedback has been along the lines of:

• Thanx so much for making my writing oh so much better, and for giving me the tools to improve my writing going forward. Excellent advice and notes.
• Thank you for your feedback and advice about my novel. I hadn’t realised there was so much work still to do on it, and although I was upset at first, going over it again I realise you were right about everything. Thanks heaps.

Friends constantly badger me to review/edit their work, and I have always held out against doing this. However, recently I had a slight lull in tech writing work after delays at the clients’ end on two contracts, so decided I’d help three friends out, who’d been asking for a while, and take a look at their fiction writing.

The first said they were “appalled and tremendously upset” about my comments, and that they couldn’t believe I had “deliberately and cruelly” set out to destroy their confidence.

The second said my feedback was “hurtful and painful”, and tried to justify the quality of their work by pointing out the numbers of editors and readers it had already been through.

The third said “your [sic] a cold-harted [sic] bitch and I think you’re[sic] writing sux and you are a false friend”. And then they unfriended me on Facebook.

What is it with friends that they can ask a professional technical writer and editor (I charge anywhere from $40-120 an hour for the work I do, and my clients keep coming back) to review their work for free, and then viciously attack you when you offer genuine advice on how to improve their writing?

I held out against helping friends for a long time because of my suspicion that friends don’t really want me to actually constructively review or edit their work; they think that, as a friend, I will simply say it’s wonderful and give it a glowing endorsement … because we are friends … no matter how bad it is. It seems this past week has proved my suspicion correct.

From now on I’ll stick to helping strangers and charging them for it … it’s far, far more rewarding than trying to help friends.

Today's Kids have Lost Their Freedom

I ran my first Writers' Workshop for primary (elementary) school children yesterday, and talking to the kids, and the event itself, made me aware of just how much kids of today have lost from what we had in my day (1970s).

First up ... instead of posting a photo for the kids enjoying the workshop, I can only post this:

If I had taken a photo of the class, I would have had to get the signatures of 15 parents granting permission to post the photo on the net. Hence, the generic photo from Dollar Photo Club instead.

Secondly, the workshop involved 15 children walking into the library, up two flights of stairs, and into a room where they sat around a table for two hours. This required the librarian organising the workshop to write a SIX PAGE Safety Hazard management Plan. SERIOUSLY! When did OSH take over the world, and when did they go mad?

It was interesting that when I asked the kids what their favourite books were, the first to speak said "Enid Blyton - The Famous Five", and all the other kids agreed they loved those books. The Magic Faraway Tree was mentioned next, followed by Nancy Drew. J.K. Rowling - eat your heart out. It’s great that the old classics are still loved, despite what the naysayers think.

The kids were gobsmacked when I told them that at the time the Famous Five books were written, what the kids did was entirely possible. That is, the kids and Timmy could get into a boat and row over to George’s Island for a camping trip with NO PARENTAL SUPERVISION. Or they could hire a gypsy caravan and go off on a trip for a week with NO PARENTAL SUPERVISION. And no cell phone contact.

I could see a few of them still doubting, so told them that during the summer holidays when I was their age (10) my brother (8), my sister (4) and I would leave the house at 9am with a packed lunch, and come home at 6pm in time for dinner. We would spend the entire day playing Pirates or Cowboys and Indians or Space Travellers down the steep banks that led to Edgecumbe Park. On weekends we would go to Turners & Growers, where The Warehouse is today.
Turners & Growers was a wholesale fruit and vege auction house (closed weekends), with vast pathways of beautiful smooth concrete on the outside of the building that just screamed to be skated on. Not only that, but the packing pallets were all stacked in the yard, with no pesky fences or barbed wire to content with. We spent hours climbing on those things. And you know what? NO ONE EVER DIED!

Today it takes a six page Hazard management Plan to allow kids to sit at a desk for two hours. As one of the kids in the workshop said, “It must have been so cool to be a kid then … you had so much freedom.” It was, and we did, and it saddens me that the only way today’s kids can have any idea of the sense of freedom and responsibility kids once had is through the pages of books written 50 to 60 years ago. It also, I believe, explains why many of today’s kids are so addicted to video games. It’s the only way they can play adult-supervision free, make their own mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and grow as human beings.

On a different note, but still out of the same workshop, was something for children’s and YA authors to consider. When I was picked up by a distribution company to get my novels into retail stores (something that eventually fell through because of the cost) they said I would have to change the cover. A librarian rated my first novel one star on Goodreads pretty much based on how awful she thought the cover was. So, I redid the cover and produced a much cleaner and simpler one (shown on the right).

The kids preferred the one on the left! So, there’s a dilemma for authors that I have no answer for: while you want to have a book cover that appeals to kids, you have to actually produce a book cover that appeals to adults instead, as they are usually the ones holding the purse strings. But then, the kids won’t want to read it. This dichotomy between kids and adults is also, I believe, why so many great novels had so many rejections before being published (Harry Potter 9 rejections, Dr Seuss 24, A Wrinkle in Time 26, The Princess Diaries 17). Traditionally publishing houses STILL have 50 year old men in suits smoking cigars (well, maybe not the cigars anymore) deciding what kids want to read. Why not ask the kids?