Into the Fire

One of the fascinating things about writing and reading fiction is noting the reactions of other writers to what they're reading as compared to those readers who don't write.

Make no mistake, writers have their favorite authors, and those favorites can be comprised of all different kinds of voices and styles or strict adherence to particular voices and styles.

Readers seem to me to be far more diverse in their preferences than most authors I know. Authors I know stick to a regimen of genres with a couple of exceptions. Take me. Once in a great while I will read something which is normally way off my radar. In fact, it usually means a writer friend has written a novel which is outside my usual preferences, but because of them I will make an exception to my rule. One rule which I have yet to break: I don't read fantasy. For anyone.

Authors tend to notice things in other authors' works which we fail to notice in our own. It's easy enough to do. Our story is interesting to us from start to finish, but with someone else's story the same areas of annoyance in their work appear in our own without attention. We can be guilty of the same things which irritate us because in our stories it's different. Except it isn't. We just like our story better and we prefer how we did it over how they did it.

The important factor for us as writers is to recognize that our techniques are not unique. We strive to separate ourselves from the staid and norm, but sometimes it's impossible to do. Our efforts must result in creating characters our hoped-for readers can enjoy, relate to, have empathy with, or hopefully can elicit some kind of attachment to them. Or else our story had better pack enough punch to overcome any weaknesses.

And of course there will be readers and writers who don't like our gut-wrenching efforts and will proclaim their opinions in reviews, on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads to our shame or embarrassment or disappointment or whatever it is we feel when we see one star on Amazon.

Nevertheless, we like what we like and don't what we don't. Writer or reader, we can often see the same things as somehow different.

Father, help us to see what we need to see when writing and reading. Help us to always improve and to strive to be the one you designed us to be. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.