You have polished a piece of your writing and are ready for someone else to read it. You take an enormous risk when you ask someone else for feedback. You make yourself vulnerable to being misunderstood or worse. It’s more than words on a piece of paper which stand in judgment. It’s you—your soul—on the line. Every red pen mark on the page feels like a personal injury. Margin comments seem like attacks on your integrity. Flaws and defects highlighted. Your face flushes with embarrassment as spelling and grammar errors you didn’t catch slap you upside the head. Questions raised you didn’t answer. Misperceptions identified. Clichés. Unnecessary adverbs or empty adjectives. Redundancies. Passive voice and zombie nouns. And all the life sucked out of your precious piece. Your ego deflates faster than a pin-pricked balloon. One of the biggest reasons writers are reluctant to share their work is the fear of negative feedback. You aren’t likely to share it if you think your work isn’t already your personal best and you hope readers will provide you with affirmations of your efforts. And yet you want to know whether it works for readers or not. When you ask for feedback you need to be prepared for negative as much as positive criticism. Negative criticism will help you much more than Stuart Smalley-style affirmations: “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.” If you seek only to enhance your self-esteem you won’t be able to improve your writing…

The 29th Austin Jewish Book Fair was held October 28 through November 1 at the Dell Jewish Community Campus. It was a pleasure to sit with my “sistahs” again at the fair (Sisterhood members of Congregation Agudas Achim), but the contrast between last year and this was noticeable. Last year the fair opened with the book lover’s luncheon, and this year it closed with it, so at this year’s lunch the book shelves were relatively empty as earlier shoppers had already cleaned them out. I did, however, find enough selections in the children’s section for holiday gifts, including Jane Yolen and Mark Teague’s remake of their best-seller, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Their new, equally charming title: How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah? How could I resist?   Two book fair events were cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Matti Friedman, author of The Aleppo Codex, and Harry Ostrer, author of Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, were unable to fly out of New York. Maggie Anton, author of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy (somewhere between I.B. Singer’s Yentl and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent), was the featured speaker for the book lover’s luncheon. She was able to attend as she was traveling from Los Angeles. Anton was promoting her latest release, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, described as a “novel of love, the Talmud, and sorcery in third-century Babylonia.” I’m sure it is a fine novel, but Anton was not a fine presenter. The take-away lesson from her talk was: How…

POV. Point of View. When you begin to write, you must decide who will tell the story. You will, of course. Duh. You are the narrator if you are the writer. But who are you? Are you the heroic character? The omniscient voice of God? The fly on the wall? Journalist reporting from the scene? How do you find the right narrator’s voice? One of the simplest guides to sort through this issue is Spilling Ink: A Young Writer’s Handbook by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter (Roaring Brook Press, 2010). The two Ithaca area authors intended to write a how-to book for kids who want to write, but I find it a handy desk reference for developmental editing with adult authors. Mazer and Potter spell out POV in one short chapter. They use simple clear language unfettered by highfalutin literary jargon. First-person narrative is used in memoir and personal essays. “This is when one of the characters in the story is narrating. It can be a main character or one of the minor characters. You can generally recognize first-person narrative right away because the narrator uses the prounoun I,” writes Anne Mazer on page 67 of Spilling Ink. First-person point of view, however, poses challenges to the writer who can only present the narrator’s experience without comment or the vantage of other characters’ point-of-view. Huck Finn is the classic first-person narrator; the whole story is told in his voice. Second-person narrative can be confusing to some storytellers. “This is when the…