I can sometimes be narrow-minded when it comes to my writing. I have learned this about myself, and my mother has mentioned this to me a time or two.
One area I would be narrow-minded would be in the writing process. I don’t like when people give suggestions for characterization, storyline, etc. I tend to have the idea that if someone gives me advice, then the “story” isn’t mine anymore. I don’t really know why I think this, but I have this attitude that if you “help” me, then it isn’t my story. Now, there have been occasions when I have taken an idea someone has given me, and I have incorporated that into my story….and I still consider it “my” story.
A second area I tend to be narrow-minded, however, I have significantly improved in this area, is the editing process. I used to do one of two things, both of which I don’t do nearly as much now. I used to either ignore the suggested edit simply because I liked the way it sounded how I wrote it, or I used to message/ask them why they changed it. This I did a lot, now I do it on occasion, but I have become a lot more accepting of edits – so that is good. For example, my mother commented on an entire scene that I really loved in my Noah’s ark novel that will soon be published. She commented that it was silly or the such, but I had a specific reason for having it in the book – to illustrate God’s dominion over even the creatures of the earth. I asked my editor what he thought of the scene, and he told me that he understood what I was trying to “say” with that passage, however, it would go over many reader’s heads. So….I took it out, changed the scene a bit, and…I dare say…I think it made it all flow better.
Another area that I am pretty narrow-minded in again has to do with my writing process. I tend to have this attitude that when I finish writing my story that it is done and I don’t really need to go back and add to or take out portions of it, especially recently, as I have come to understand that when I write, God and I commune and we write my stories together. This is the fault of mine I am going to camp on for a bit. For a little background on my perspective with my writing, I view my writing process as a communion with God. He has given me a gift of creativity (not just in writing, but writing is my focus) so when I activate and operate in this gifting, I truly believe that God communes with me and speaks to me – in essence, we write my fiction together. For this reason, I tend to think that if God didn’t impress on me to do it a different way the first time, then it must be good, and I don’t need to alter it. This I know not to be the case, but it is just how I think. Because of this, I tend to view my stories as finished, even though, sometimes, I need to go back and add or take out parts. I do this seldom but have done it before, so I guess in this area I still have a lot to improve. In truth, one of my stories - this may be before I realized God communes with me during writing, and before I started praying before writing my fiction – was actually improved when I took my three favorite supporting characters out of the story, so I know this attitude of mine to be erroneous thinking. God is a God of the process, not necessarily the finished product (or you could say God is a God of the journey, not the destination), so it makes sense that he would use a cyclical process of writing just as anyone else would. By cyclical, I mean continuously moving back and forth between writing, editing, and revising as one writes. In writing, it is seldom a step by step process. It usually isn’t write it, then go back and edit, then go back and move paragraphs around (especially in research papers). It is usually as we write, we discover a particular paragraph would make more sense somewhere else, so we might make a note to move it later (or we move it then) and continue to write our first draft. As we continue, we might edit words we notice we have misspelled, and finally, do the “official edit” in which we might even move more paragraphs around and even add to paragraphs. It makes sense to me that the God who invented the universe would use the same concepts he has given to his creation to accomplish his purposes. Still, though, I tend to neglect this aspect of God’s writing process for me. I do edit, and I have moved paragraphs around when I realized they didn’t make sense where they were, but I often only follow the copy edit of my editor. I don’t go back and take out or add scenes to make my stories better. Shame on me!!!