377 days - Blog #87 a lesson from criticism

I’ve told this story many times.  So if you already know it, forgive the repetition.

Six years ago (holy cow, six years ago) I decided to write a novel.  I had two main inspirations.  One was a car ride home, contemplating a high school reunion.  But that was actually the result of something else.

Earlier that autumn I directed a play.  On tech Sunday, I was given some very harsh criticism.  To the person’s credit, it was said to my face.  On the other hand, I really didn’t understand it.  I was told that I was not qualified to direct Shakespeare, among several other comments on my organization of the production.  Six years later, I am willing to admit some merit in those comments.  Not the first… but there is always something to be learned from how other people experience something – especially a something as stressful as a play rehearsal process.  Anyway, the gut punch was the concluding comment that I am kind only because I pretend to be so, when in fact I am really a very not nice person.

Okay.  Whatever.  I suppose we could say that six years is a long time to hold onto these statements.  Criticism is something with which we all have to deal and learn to disregard… or at least keep a salt shaker handy to tenderize it.  That said, these remarks cut into my soul like nothing else ever had before.  It led me to some dark places in my soul… but it is mostly the way I found my way out that is the reason I keep them in my memory locked.

I retreated into myself that fall.  The upshot of my anti-social behavior is that I started reading again with all that time that I previously devoted to rehearsals.  One of the books I picked up was Twilight.  It was all the rage that fall, just before the first movie came out.  Everyone I knew was reading it.  So I went to the bookstore and bought my own shiny copy.  

It was one of those books that pulled me in.  You know the kind.  A book whose characters seem so real, whose emotions get linked to your own, whose ending you can’t wait to discover and sleep and work are cruel interruptions until you get there.  It was also… so poorly written.  Strike that.  I didn’t like how it was written.  It didn’t suit my qualifications of good writing.  And yet… there I was, consuming books I, II, III, and… well IV was a different story.

And I hated myself for it.

Because… it wasn’t written well.

But… what did I know?

I mean, I hadn’t written a book.

Well, not a complete book.

Definitely not a vampire book.

So what the hell did I know?

All I had written in the recent years were a handful of blogs and verbose emails.

Wasn’t I just being critical catty because I had to find fault in what someone else did that I was too scared to do?  I thought of all those things said to me on that tech Sunday and ways I tried to reconcile myself with being so accused of fault.  Maybe my hypotheses were untrue… but I didn’t want to be that person.  The person who used criticism as a mask to my fear.  To let my fear permit me to disregard a book that was clearly successful.  To judge what it takes to do something well when I never even tried to do it myself.

So I wrote a vampire novel.  From my starting point at the end of November 2008 to when I hit publish in February 2011, I wrote several drafts (I actually lost track, but I know it exceeded ten).  I leant to readers both near and dear as well as distant and very, brutally honest.  I submitted it to agents and was rejected.  (Which I suppose in some people’s minds validates the fact I am not indeed a worthy writer.)  And then I decided to publish it myself.  That in and of itself is a whole separate journey, but one that concludes with a much greater appreciation of what it is to be a writer and how one can never stop learning and improving… or escape the criticism of bitter readers.

Anyway, like I said, I often tell this story when I talk about my book.  Why I would write a vampire novel.  And I usually say something like, “I decided that unless I wrote a vampire novel, I had no justification to criticize someone else who did.”  At that point, a lot of people assume my next comment is going to be, “and now that I did, I will tell you Twilight sucks."  Well, honestly, I have done that.  But my heart wasn’t in it.  I do have strong feelings against Twilight, but it’s more to do with the bullshit that a woman’s soul is in greater danger for having pre-marital sex than you know, becoming a blood sucking vampire.  I don’t hate it for poor writing.

Maybe it isn’t a scholarly or literary masterpiece.  But, you know what book I’m talking about, don’t you?  It’s a pretty successful series.  Yes, the hype machine helped with it.  But it was mostly word of mouth.  That word of mouth came from something into which I was drawn myself.  That book tapped into the teenage girl and her illogical, fanatical emotions that still dwell somewhere in my heart and the hearts of millions of readers.  That is a skill separate from and maybe, on some level, superior to a brilliance with syntax and grammar. 

I envy it.

No.  Actually, I’m learning from it.  The importance of connecting to a reader like that is huge and absolutely essential in this new world of publishing and reading and competing for the attention of someone who would rather read Facebook than a book.

The greater lesson, though, is a more personal one.

Credit Chris Chabot via Flickr Creative Commons

About criticism.

I was hurt so deeply by those things said to me.  I have forgiven them.  Because I have truly attempted to right the small bits of truth about what was wrong with my behavior.  But in being hurt, it opened my eyes to how I criticize.  And how that impulse is informed by my own fear.  Then, when I confront that fear, what someone else does ‘wrong’ suddenly isn’t so wrong.  It’s just a different way of doing things, something with which I am happy to live when I am also doing that thing.  Not just watching from afar with resentment.