Ouch!

So,
My friend has read all of the chapters I've given her so far. I went to give her another chapter on Saturday, and as much good feedback as she gave, I have to say the painfulness of it surprised me. It took me a good day and a half to pull myself out of the "depths of despair" and I still think I'm stinging a little from it. Those people (myself included) who refer to writing a novel as creating a child weren't kidding. As much as you try not to, you still end up taking most of it personal, and it is like someone is criticizing your child. I was pretty shocked I took it so hard.
But I suppose I'd better get used to it. That, and learn to understand that when people are pointing out faults, it's usually because they like the rest of it and the parts that don't jive are messing with what they already like.

But really, my friend gave me great feedback, a lot of it I already was wondering about and knew. I know when I'm completely finished with this draft, I will be much more grateful for her because she's completely honest and that's something I really value. The only thing I found particularly unfortunate about it was that she had already read the first nine chapters of my last draft and I've changed quite a bit since then and she ended up being kind of disappointed about that. I, of course, have yet to put as much work into this draft as I did the one she read first, so hopefully when this manuscript is at the polished level as the last she'll like this one better. But there it is, you can't please everyone, and I like this draft better, though she had some good points I will put back into this one.

I suppose this experience is a good sign. First of all, I could tell she was passionate about a lot of things she talked to me about, which means that she cares about the story. And secondly, it was mostly stuff that I already knew about and nothing that had to do with the basic story line, so there's another plus. Most of what she talked about was clarity and character development, something I've been waiting to embellish until I'm sure the story line is awesome. But there really wasn't anything major she talked about that I wasn't already planning on doing. How often can you say that, eh?

Whew! There you have it folks! I'm having some growing pains as an writer.