I just finished up reading and taking notes on all of the written comments people had for my writing submission to the New York Summer Writers Institute. Even though no one ever asked, I was still paranoid enough to come up with a cover story for why I only read the comments one year after recieveing them: I needed to get some distance from the writing to properly process the comments. The truth (which I guess doesn’t really need that designator since I never actually told the lie) was that I was scared out of my wits to read the comments. Even when I finally brought myself to do it, I turned the page slowly and with a shaking hand, the way that people open doors in horror movies after the monster has already built up a sizable body count. And even though not a single one of the thousands of comments were unfair or needless harsh (with the possible exception of “choose a title, buttface!”), I cringed at half of them and never stopped turning the page with a sense of horror.
It’s odd that I’d be so sensitive to criticism, because I’m endlessly self-critical (as you know if you pick up on half the humor on this blog). Case in point: around the end of my sophomore year I finished my first novel. I printed out all 150 pages of it on my own dime, jamming up the Edina High School printers three times. I planned to spend the summer marking it up and turning it into something publishable. In the end, I only made one comments on it, scrawled across the top of the first page: “This has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I deserve to by drawn and quartered in public for writing this. If anyone asks why, the executioner should just hand them this manuscript and they’ll understand before they finish the first chapter.” That’s hyperbole, of course, but by less than you would think. It hasn’t gotten much better over time. There’s hardly a thing that I’ve written, published or not, that doesn’t have some major element that fills my with shame.
It turns out, being hypercritical is a pretty common trait in writers. A friend of mine recently started a very good writing blog, and in one of my favorite posts, she shares a few of her favorite comments on her own first drafts. A few of the best are, “I can’t tell if this is dumb, over the top, or great,” and “Not happy with the way this is introduced but yeah the moon is purple fight me” (which is immediately followed by “Remove all references to the moon being purple. That was dumb”). In fact, you hardly need to look into any of the articles about revision (this is hardly an original entry in the ever-growing genre) to find that even great authors are endlessly self-critical. Some even vow to never crack the spine of their book after publication, because there are so many errors that they’ll never get to fix.
So why is self-criticism seemingly an inseparable part of being a writer, while criticism from others is so stressful (at least for me)? After all, the comments that made me bite the tongue were often just more polite versions of what I thought when I was first writing it.
I think the answer is control. Writing is essentially about control. When you put pen to paper or fingertips to keys, then you’re your own little god in your own little world. That’s a large part of the thrill. When other people comment on your work, you realize that, even with absolute power over time and space and matter, the end result just wasn’t good enough. You let someone else into the system, and they screwed it up, and all while you just needed a couple more days to perfect it.
But you can never really be alone in your little universe. The end goal of all writing is to be read, if not by someone else then, by the version of you a couple years removed, and even that can be truly terrifying. So it’s best to let the world in slowly, in little tour groups of trusted first readers, and handle those waves of fear the best you can.
My teacher for the New York Writer’s Institute last year was Adam Braver. Basically everything he said over those two weeks was an invaluable insight about writing, my favorite of which was, “writers have to suffer from incredible hubris and equal humility.” The wording suggests that this something writers must overcome, and I think that’s true, but it’s also necessary to the process of writing itself. You need the hubris to build your world and the humility to let everyone else wash in and knock it over so you can build it back better next time.
A final note: I actually lied at the start of this post. I hope to be finished reading the comments by the time this goes up, but I’m actually writing it four days prior, still reeling from the polite and mild and reasonable comments my fellow workshop attendees scrawled in the margins. I wrote this to see if I could motivate myself to get through the rest of the stack. And I think I can.
A final note from two days later: I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment