![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/WeddingRings.jpg\" "\\"WeddingRings\\"")
Showing your writing to anybody always involves trust, and when you show it to someone you respect and love enough to be your life partner, the stakes can be high.\u00a0 So can the rewards.<\/p>\nI asked my published writer friends if they show their writing to their spouses or loved ones, and out of twelve writers, five of us only rarely, if ever, show our work to our spouses, and seven of us regularly do.\u00a0 A few of us show our spouses our writing every day and depend upon their feedback as an integral part of the writing process.<\/p>\n
Showing your writing to anybody always involves trust, and when you show it to someone you respect and love enough to be your life partner, the stakes can be high.\u00a0 So can the rewards.<\/p>\n
My writer friends who show work to their spouses count on their readers to be respectful and honest.\u00a0 Gentleness counts, too, and being clear about what is really wanted from the reader.\u00a0 Stephanie Burgis<\/a>, who is married to another writer, Patrick Samphire<\/a>, swaps her writing with him every day, and she says they are careful to be only positive about first drafts.\u00a0 \u201cThen the draft gets finished…and the rules change,\u201d Stephanie says. \u201cAt that point, we become each other’s toughest critics, because we care so much about each other’s work, and we want it to be the best that it can be. Every critique starts and ends with something positive and true, but in the middle we are ruthless.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of us writers who don\u2019t confer so closely with our spouses still depend upon them for help with brainstorming, whether with plot sequences or details in our spouses\u2019 areas of expertise.\u00a0 My husband is a professor of physiology and neurobiology, so when I have questions about suppressor genes, he\u2019s the one I consult.\u00a0 I\u2019ve shown him specific passages for reassurance I haven\u2019t bungled anything, and I find such input invaluable.<\/p>\n Beyond that, however, I don\u2019t ask him to read my work, and I\u2019m not alone on that.\u00a0 Some of my writer friends have spouses who genuinely have no interest in the types of books we write.\u00a0 Some of us are so sensitive that we take even the mildest suggestion as a harrowing criticism, and don\u2019t want that stress to trickle over into our marriages.\u00a0 Some of us enjoy keeping our jobs separate from our private lives, especially if we tend to get lost in our heads and depend on our spouses to keep us grounded in the non-writing world.\u00a0 Without exception, even those of us who never seek out our spouses\u2019 input on the nitty-gritty feel their devoted support.<\/p>\n Support is the key, no matter what kind it is that we need. \u00a0Each writer has to discover what works best for him or her in terms of seeking spousal feedback.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to throw out a radical idea here: I think we\u2019re married first and writers second.\u00a0 You know, like those people with other jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I asked my published writer friends if they show their writing to their spouses or loved ones, and out of twelve writers, five of us only rarely, if ever, show our work to our spouses, and seven of us regularly do.\u00a0 A few of us show our spouses our writing every day and depend upon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}