Reflections on Writing

One major lesson I learnt today - the biggest crime u can commit while writing a story is dictatorship over your "Subjects", namely the characters you create. This means being in complete control over what happens to them, what they do, what they are supposed to do, and so on and so forth. And believe it or not, moat of the time, the seed of this crime comes from what many amateur writers seek as the most valuable ingredient for growth: 'feedback', mostly from your well-wishers and loved ones.

Now don't get me wrong here. I am not saying that you should close yourself to the opinions of others and form this impenetrable wall of stubbornness around yourself and your story. Of course a second opinion is necessary at times to get a balanced perspective on your story. After all, the very fact that you spent a significant portion of your time and efforts over its creation makes you its parent. And as we all know, every parent thinks his/ her child to be the most special in the world. So a second or third-party perspective is of course necessary to gain an unbiased insight.

The problem comes when you begin treating the other party's judgment as sacrosanct and all-knowing. This is a major area of vulnerability especially for first-time or aspiring writers. Sometimes, the pressure of public opinion becomes so high that writers end up changing the very essence of their stories, the basic nature of their characters. Nothing could be more tragic. Because if you satisfy individual "A" with a particular change, tomorrow you will find an individual "B" who will be dissatisfied with that very change. Worse, he might suggest other changes to counterbalance this particular alteration. And before you know it, your magnum opus, your source of pride, your own creative offspring, will become unrecognizable to you. You will become the proverbial mother bird which ended up rejecting its own eggs after someone else had touched them, as it couldn't find its own scent in them anymore.

My basic point is this - accept feedback from one and all, because the fact that people are responding to your story itself shows that they are interested in it. Be grateful for it. But at the end of the day, sit down with those suggestions and filter them out according to what you think is apt for your story. Trust your judgment. After all, no one knows your story better than you do.