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natalieweepoetry · 7 years ago

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Are there or have there been any particular teachers, professors, or other adult mentors in your life that have influenced you and your writing? Also, how did you become confident in your work? To be a bit more specific, I'm curious, inner-confidence aside, how do you know/decide what outside opinions/reviews/criticisms to take to heart? As in, who's opinion of your work do you trust enough to take their advice in terms of helping you improve or edit a poem?

Hello!! I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to respond! Thank you so much for your questions!

Well… My junior college literature teacher was a verbally abusive woman who swore at students and slammed doors, and pretty much terrified me out of writing as a career. I guess she influenced me in that I wanted to succeed just to spite her. My sociology professors were godsends and I absolutely loved my cultural studies professors. They taught me the importance of positionality and reflexivity, which is something I hope to work on more.

Most of my confidence came from writing online and figuring out what I personally liked to see in writing—it’s probably an unusual starting point, but hey. A lot of it, I think, was curating a sense of style I personally enjoyed and then adapting aspects of it and making it my own. I continued doing that professionally and learning techniques by writing. Like, my writing improves the most 1 week before something is due for submission, just because during that week I’ll rewrite the same thing 1000 times before submission. And that improvement is something you can sense! Like maybe words come easier or you phrase something in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to a year or month or day ago. Seeing those moments give me confidence in myself, which in turn enables me to carry myself forward in writing!

I don’t think you ever really know what outside opinions/reviews/criticisms to take to heart. For me, it was always more about what I liked. Was I writing like someone I could be proud of? That was more important to me than anything. It’s really tempting, as a young poet, to kind of trust someone’s words 100% on your writing, but that may not always be the best thing to do.

Case in point: I was part of a poet-in-residence program while working on “The Other Woman”, and was set up with a prize-winning Canadian poet. Her feedback was that (1) the form of my poem didn’t seem to have a purpose and I should stick to a more regular form, (2) there wasn’t a single consistent image which meant there was way too much going on, (3) I should think about writing only as a hobby unless my husband could support me and the kids.

So I like, went back, looked at my poem, and decided that I could work on (1) more technically but I didn’t want to use a regular form, (2) was definitely advice I needed to hear and helped me tremendously in getting this poem into The Adroit Journal, and as for (3) this old straight white woman just could not fathom that I was a young Asian lesbian.

So working on stuff is kind of like that. There’s no 100% perfect advice. It’s a lot of critical listening, which is figuring out what works for you and understanding someone else’s positionality when they’re giving you advice, and using what you can to make yourself better. Like, writing is kind of like a video game in that occasionally you meet characters who hand you random objects, the characters being people and objects being feedback. It’s important to pick those objects up and inspect them, because if you don’t pick them up at all, you won’t know anything about what’s being offered. But in this game, what’s your character’s end goal, and how does keeping that object help?

TL;DR: What’s the style you want to achieve as a writer? What techniques do you want to be better at? I find that those questions usually guide me when making my decisions about what writing advice to take to heart.

I hope this helped!!

#thank you for your questions! <3 #I'm sorry it's taken so long!#ask #ATLASOFIMPOSSIBLEDREAMS #atlasofimpossibledreams

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