How to Get Good Advice

[To read more of Shawn’s stuff, subscribe to www.storygrid.com]

When seeking editorial counsel:

Don’t be like Johnny Fontane

Don’t ask a writer or editor you do not respect to give you constructive criticism.
Find a writer or editor you respect and ask just one time for his/her undivided attention. (unless you are compensating them). You cannot go back to the well again and again and again…unless you stupidly keep paying them for advice you never take…
Spend less time with writers and editors you do not respect.
Spend more time with writers and editors you do respect.
When a writer or editor you respect takes the time to consider your work and offers advice…Thank them and act on it. Even if you think the advice is stupid… Chances are, if you respect them, the advice they’re offering is just the thing you need to take your work to the next level.

Whatever you do, don’t respond like this:

Thanks for these notes, but I’m going for something bigger than just “genre” fiction.
My ________ (best friend, husband, guru, bridge partner) didn’t think my rape scene was gratuitous…so I’m confused about why you had such a hard time with it.
I’m too close to the work now to consider the kinds of changes you’re suggesting. I mean, I’d probably have to re-write the whole thing!
I read an interview with Jean Cocteau in the Paris Review that contradicts your insistence that readers want a beginning, middle and end. As I recall, he said something like this “There is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.”  I guess I’m like Cocteau. I just can’t compromise my vision to serve the necessities of the marketplace.
I don’t work that way.

[To read more of Shawn’s stuff, subscribe to www.storygrid.com]