Thankyou as always for your encouragement . It’s like getting your essay back at school with an A!!! Only much much better! I have never written with such regularity and I love the way I ponder over my next installation before being compelled to write just one of the threads in my head. Such a process for me & you were in my head as I wr…
Thankyou as always for your encouragement . It’s like getting your essay back at school with an A!!! Only much much better! I have never written with such regularity and I love the way I ponder over my next installation before being compelled to write just one of the threads in my head. Such a process for me & you were in my head as I wrote this because I was first introduced to your writing by the poolside which I was intrigued by ! Thankyou .
Ah smiling at this! The problem with those A's when they arrive with us is that they rarely give us a sense of why we've been awarded them - or that was my experience always.
It was such a huge help & gift n my MA, the very last stage of my formal education, when a tutor bothered to explain why he'd given that mark each time. Those three essays from him were so precious that they sustained me through twenty years of not publishing. They're under the bed I'm in now!
And you can imagine how wonderful it was to send him a copy of The Cure for Sleep all these years later (where he is third in the Acknowledgements after my mother and very first teacher) to say simply: 'What you taught me, how you taught me, how you gave feedback - it made a lifelong difference. Thank you.'
The letter he then wrote back - well: it didn't matter after that if any nasty critical reviews came through early this year! I knew it had been read and understood by an old teacher whose values meant so much to me...
All this as a very long way of saying: I try always to give anyone submitting work a sense of what has an effect on me and why. My editor for the book also worked this way, and it was only after the second draft that she began to identify problems instead of praise - but that kind of critique is only necessary very close to a long thing going to print. Before then the very best progress and results come from identifying what is strong and unusual in a writer's voice/point of view...
And what you wrote here was so strong, so clear, so full of energy.
Thankyou as always for your encouragement . It’s like getting your essay back at school with an A!!! Only much much better! I have never written with such regularity and I love the way I ponder over my next installation before being compelled to write just one of the threads in my head. Such a process for me & you were in my head as I wrote this because I was first introduced to your writing by the poolside which I was intrigued by ! Thankyou .
Ah smiling at this! The problem with those A's when they arrive with us is that they rarely give us a sense of why we've been awarded them - or that was my experience always.
It was such a huge help & gift n my MA, the very last stage of my formal education, when a tutor bothered to explain why he'd given that mark each time. Those three essays from him were so precious that they sustained me through twenty years of not publishing. They're under the bed I'm in now!
And you can imagine how wonderful it was to send him a copy of The Cure for Sleep all these years later (where he is third in the Acknowledgements after my mother and very first teacher) to say simply: 'What you taught me, how you taught me, how you gave feedback - it made a lifelong difference. Thank you.'
The letter he then wrote back - well: it didn't matter after that if any nasty critical reviews came through early this year! I knew it had been read and understood by an old teacher whose values meant so much to me...
All this as a very long way of saying: I try always to give anyone submitting work a sense of what has an effect on me and why. My editor for the book also worked this way, and it was only after the second draft that she began to identify problems instead of praise - but that kind of critique is only necessary very close to a long thing going to print. Before then the very best progress and results come from identifying what is strong and unusual in a writer's voice/point of view...
And what you wrote here was so strong, so clear, so full of energy.