As
a writer, I tend to collect bits of advice on writing. Some of it is good; some of it is not. (I’m sure you’ve noticed that people like to
give advice, even when they don’t really know what they are talking
about.) Those of you who are writers are
probably familiar with some of the things I have heard. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write every day.” “Expect rejection.” And, the subject of today’s post, “You are
your own worst critic.”
Things
like this wouldn’t be repeated so often if they didn’t have some truth to
them. I’ll be the first to admit that I
can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my work. I remember the long period before I judged my
sci-fi novel to be “finished”. Every
time I spoke to my mother, who had read the draft, she would demand that I just
send it to a publisher already. She
judged it to be just fine the way it was, but I wasn’t satisfied. I still get ideas on how to improve it and
have to stop myself from going back and tinkering with it.
But
where my writing in general is concerned, I’m not entirely sure that I am a
harsh critic. Rather, I wonder sometimes
if my work can ever be fully appreciated by anyone but me.
That
sounds a bit big-headed of me, doesn’t it?
Let me clarify. I am currently working
on a fictional blog written from the viewpoint of an angel. After a few weeks and ten posts, I have three
followers, one of whom is myself, and I average a whopping one view a day. That’s all right; I know how big a place the
internet is, and how easy it is for something to get lost there. What does bother me is the feedback I am
getting. Friends and family call it “cute”
and “charming”; they say that it makes them smile. That’s nice, but it does have the kind of
undertone of someone looking for something nice to say. And I can see where they’re coming from. It’s still early days for the story, and what
I’ve posted so far does not have much depth.
The
problem is the whole story is based on an idea that I don’t know how to
explain. If my narrator knows how the
world works, and supposedly his readers know how it works, why would he tell
them what they already know? I have a
deep hatred of info-dumps, and I’m not Disney; I can’t put all my exposition into
a charming song. So I’m left with
passing references to the big questions of what angels are, why they do what
they do, how they are divided and structured.
Someday I will get to that, but I’m not sure my readers will hang around
that long. It’s frustrating, because I
have this beautiful idea that speaks to human nature and the moral evolution of
our race, a story about a war fought in the souls of women and men, an
intricate tale of free will and choices that can change the world. And readers call it “cute”.
I
live with my stories every day, and not just with the events and the timeline,
but with the backstory, the history, the culture. I have entire worlds living and breathing in
my head, and my writing is a constant struggle to put everything into
order. But it’s a task at which I could spend my
entire life, and short of unhinging my skull and turning my brain inside
out, I’m not certain I will ever be able to show everything. There will always be some crucial detail left
out, or else the words will be wrong and my readers will not understand.
Maybe
this whole post is a self-indulgent wallow that proves more than ever that I am
my own worst critic. Maybe I’m on to
something here, and if so I might as well never bother to share my work
again. But despite everything, despite
my struggles and my failures and my perfectionism and the banal compliments, I
do believe that I have something to say that the world might want to hear. So I will keep posting my work into the
echoing silence, hoping someday I might get a blip in reply.
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