Writer: Reviewing when a writer

Subtitle – rewording to how you would have written it.  Which is just as bad as reviewing with your editor’s eye.

Step away and allow yourself to escape into someone else’s world.  Forget how you would have written it.  Forgets how it reminds you of your characters or storyline.  Forget any jealousies over why didn’t you think of that.

Turn yourself off and turn on the reviewer.

Approach the story without judgment – oh, does that sound like an oxymoron.  If reviewing isn’t judging than what is it?  I always thought of it as a conversation with friends.  An opinion.  The different type of book report.

And truthfully as a reviewer we’re far kinder on others than we are on our own writing.  And that’s why we need to turn our writer brain off at this point.  It becomes our reviewer’s critic.  Which can end up stopping our objectivity cold.

The writer inside is a selfish scared nervous doubtful being.  It most likely fears the blank paper and can easily get angered by what it reads from other writers.  It forgets it’s related to their writer brain.

The best you can do is lock the writer away when you escape with your reviewer brain.  And you know the reviewer brain can be nasty on its own.  And more forgiving, too.