On One Hand – Taking Critiques

I’m reading a book right now on how to write mysteries. The author is clearly someone who prefers more hard-boiled stuff with lots of sex and violence, as he accuses mysteries without these features of being (respectively) repressed and lacking. (To be fair, if you read between the lines, he seems to be trying to relate a more universal message: avoiding sex scenes and violence out of discomfort with or opposition to the things they depict rather than because they don’t serve the story leads to a bad story.) But, more importantly, he insists that the object of writing is to appeal to other people, not (necessarily) oneself.

Heck with a blog entry, I could write a whole book about this*.

When you start making friends and acquaintances in any community of artists, you quickly come to realize that a lot of people you meet want to have their cake and eat it, too. Hey, I sure do. Almost everyone wishes for commercial success – a book deal, the New York Times bestseller list, a movie adaptation. Almost everyone wants his or her writing to reflect his or her own personal epitome of a story. In other words, most writers want to be popular as well as personal. The question of the hour is: can anyone have both?

First, let’s differentiate between another conflict artists often face: quantity vs. quality. It’s commonly accepted that a lot of very popular things (soap operas, movies starring Adam Sandler, the Goosebumps and Baby-sitter’s Club series of books) have little artistic merit. It’s also commonly accepted that many of the things to which people accord high artistic merit (the works of Shakespeare, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, etc.) aren’t very popular. However, this isn’t always the case. A lot of people liked Pan’s Labyrinth, Saved, The Dark Knight, Stardust, and The Princess Bride, and I think those are pretty darn intelligent movies. A lot of people like the books of Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett, and I think they’re extremely thoughtful writers.

In other words, while it’s true that part of what authors might consider to be their own personal style is the intelligence or skill of their work, choosing to write a smart story over a dumb one doesn’t necessarily mean choosing personal values over popularity. It can mean having to pick your audience; and often, if intelligence is one of the only things a book has going for it, then it’s not going to reach a wider audience.  Just look at the myriad academic books published each year – some professors write books for the public, but most aim to engage their peer group of fellow experts or even just one or two professionals who might find what they have to say useful to their own research. But although it seems like many popular things do eschew intelligent examination of ideas and plots in favour of emotional joy rides, the two aren’t incompatible.

So.

Basically, this is the writer’s version of the problem every adult faces on a daily basis: to what extent do you remain “true to yourself” and do what you want, and to what extent do you change your behaviour and thought to accommodate other people’s opinions and needs? The crux of the problem is, this is a happy medium issue, with no universal definition of what a “happy medium” is supposed to be.

We all know someone who’s too into themselves to function properly in society – people who want a better job or a healthier relationship or more from life in general but just aren’t willing to adapt themselves to “the system”. Obviously, for many people, this is a personal choice, and I’m not knocking choosing to be true to oneself rather than conforming for personal gain. The point isn’t that Disgruntled Sally, who hates working in minimum-wage retail but can’t get another job because she believes strongly that no one should use words containing the letter “E”, should start listening to other people who enjoy saying things like “the” and “eggs” and “elephant” – the point is she has to acknowledge that there are things she could do to attain her goals and that it’s her choice, not her circumstances, that prevent her from doing so.

We also all probably know Disgruntled Sally’s long-lost twin, Doormat Sue: whatever you ask her to do, she does it. She puts other people’s needs before her own, often despite being extremely unhappy about it. Everyone likes Sue when they first meet her, but, after a while, they begin to feel secretly contemptuous of her. Why? Because we admire people for putting others first exactly because we know they’re doing it despite the fact that they value themselves. We can see that they value themselves when they occasionally take some time to do things that they want. But Doormat Sue doesn’t seem to value herself at all – whether it’s true or not, her reaction seems knee-jerk, rather than the product of higher morals winning out over her own inclinations. And it’s hard to value someone who doesn’t seem to value themselves.

The moral of the story? Don’t be a Disgruntled Sally writer: if you’re interested in getting published and/or in being read and/or in writing something that conforms to a standard of good multiple people can agree on, then you have to listen to criticism from other people. It may be the case that you get entirely bad advice that you’re correct to reject, but, if you think that everyone in your critique group or your writing class gives horrible advice, it’s more likely that you’re the one with the problem.

BUT don’t be a Doormat Sue writer, either: don’t accept everyone’s criticisms without considering what you want. Do you care if this story gets published? (If you’re in a crit group, then probably.) Where are your critics coming from – are they the sort of people in your target audience (or at the least the sort of people who might be editing stuff for your target audience)? For instance, if someone whose taste in books is completely the opposite of yours say your story’s not for them, maybe that means you’re doing something right. If you’ve written a book in which circus clowns are evil and the hero has to kill them all, and one of your critique members is a circus clown, then maybe the fact that he doesn’t like your story shows that you’re doing what you intended (however morally dubious the rest of us think that might be**). Or if you hand your manuscript to someone who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag, and they start giving you tonnes of line-by-line advice, maybe you oughta take it with a grain of salt***. And, of course, if you’re writing just for yourself, then there’s no reason you have to take any advice at all.

The reason, however, that most writing books stress listening to others’ criticisms is because most people aren’t writing just for themselves. And let’s face it: the vast majority of us are more inclined to be a Disgruntled Sally than a Doormat Sue. And there are far more people who use “not being a Doormat Sue” as an excuse to avoid making difficult but important changes to their writing than actual Doormat Sues who need to stand up for themselves. Most of us, when asked to choose between our own opinion and that of others, generally choose our own.

But… the very best thing about writing, as opposed to real life, is that YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE THAT CHOICE. At least, not right away. Because rewriting your story with the main character as a clown, even though you despise clowns, doesn’t change your first draft that’s safely tucked away, in which your main character is still exactly the way you first conceived of her – that is, patently not-clownish. What’s the worst that could happen? Either it turns out that your friend’s strange criticism was exactly spot-on after all, in which case you gain a better story, or you learn more about why your story worked the way it was, in which case you gain understanding and experience. Because no element of a story should be there because it’s the only thing you could think of. It should be there only because it’s the best thing anyone could think of.

For more on this theme, see part II next week. Same blog-time, same-blog channel!

* In a scary coincidence, the day after I began this blog entry, this exact topic was brought up by my critique-group partners. Something’s in the water!

** Of course, it can’t hurt to re-examine the core beliefs behind your themes, either. Dare I say it: more on this next week.

*** But just maybe. Sometimes, the things you notice most as a critique partner are the things that are actually the worst about your own writing. I know I’m that way – I guess it’s because I try to train myself to spot the things I know I’m bad at, whether I’m reading my own stuff or other people’s.