YouWriteOn

I’m thinking of joining YouWriteOn. This is a website set up by the Arts Council in which you review the first five to seven thousand words of someone else’s novel and they review yours. Each time you do a review for someone else (chosen at random) someone will do a review for you. When you have enough reviews you are entered into a chart, the top entries of which receive feedback from publishing editors. The site also – I think – has links to ebook publishing.

It’s not so much the last two services that interest me but the possibility of receiving feedback from other writers. I’ve tried writing groups and everyone is always much too polite to say anything helpful and any comments are fairly superficial. The YouWriteOn scoring system on the other hand seems quite detailed, with marks given on several different aspects, including plot, characters, setting and dialogue.

Already, this is bearing fruit. I thought it would be a simple matter to tidy up the beginning of my novel and get it ready to upload as I’ve already done quite a bit of work on it, but the possibility of it being being read by a peer (rather than a publisher) – someone I want to entertain, not impress – has completely changed my attitude to it. I want to rewrite it all. And the simple fact that someone might read it has made the writing fun again instead of something that could take years and then moulder on a shelf – which is very depressing.

It is a bit confusing though. Once you start pulling something to pieces it tends to fall apart. And then I don’t know where I am.

I keep telling myself however that it’s not surprising that I’m taking so long to get the hang of this fiction-writing caper. After all, I’ve only been doing it for about ten years, and sporadically in that time and with next to no guidance, whereas I’ve been writing non-fiction professionally since 1979 with plenty of editors breathing down my neck.

Does all this make sense? My brain’s in a bit of a whirl.