Happy Friday,
A woman I grew up with has an adult daughter. We’ll call them Momma and child. One day, child messaged and said she’s writing a book. Could I have a look, she wondered? Of course, I said. Send it over.
Then I get a message from Momma. It said “Please let her down gently. That’s my baby”
Wow, Momma.
The book was quite good. It needed editing, but what first draft doesn’t? She needed some help with technical skills, but what new writer doesn’t? But she had promise, and I told her that. I never told her what her Momma said.
It would have broken her heart.
Crabs in a bucket…
Maybe you heard part of this. If you put one crab in a bucket, it will crawl right back out. Put it back in the bucket, out it goes. You can’t keep one crab in a bucket.
Put more than one crab in a bucket and they’ll never get out. One crab starts trying to crawl out and the others pull it right back down. True fact.
If you look that up on the Internet, you’ll find people talking about how it’s a metaphor for humans who try to undermine anyone that tries to elevate themselves. Wikipedia sums it up as “if I can't have it, neither can you!”
Except, that’s not why crabs pull each other back.
A crab is hard-wired real simple. If you can’t swim out, climb out. So they grab the closest thing they can. If there’s no other crabs, the closest thing is the top of the bucket. But if there’s other crabs? The closet thing is the highest crab.
Interesting, no? The truth is probably a better metaphor for human behavior than the wrong conclusion most of the internet believes. No surprise there. Yay internet.
Be careful who you ask advice from…
So many people ask their loved ones for feedback. And unless your loved ones work in the field you’re asking them about, that’s usually a bad idea.
Lacking field knowledge, they’re either going to try to “spare” your feelings, or they’ll be so biased they can’t see what someone who is objective can see.
If we have an opinion without benefit of education on the topic, we say more about ourselves than whatever it is we’re commenting on.
Just like Momma and her child’s book.
If you really want feedback, the best person to ask is someone who has experience and understands the difference between critic and critique. They are not the same and only the latter is helpful. Critique we could all use. Critics, not so much.
This is especially true if you write on a place like Medium or Quora. If public opinion was any accurate measure of quality, we wouldn’t see a glut of trite and downright bad self-help that inevitably floats to the top.
They’re great places to build an interest-based audience, but they’re not a measure of quality by any stretch of the imagination.
If you’re writing a book or thinking of it, I wrote this for you…
The Top 5 Reasons Self-Published Books Fail
In case you missed it last week…
Writing Tips from Pulitzer Winning Authors
If you click through to read the articles I send every week, thank you. It does my heart good to see those clicks in my Medium stats. And it keeps me writing. :)
Have a great weekend.
xo
Linda