MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Let’s say you’re writing a book.  Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you and sent to copy-editors, printers, buyers, and the world at large.

Meanwhile, time passes. Birds fly south for the winter.  Your shoes wear out and you buy new ones. Eventually, if you’re lucky, reviews start coming out.  I.e., reviewers are now evaluating and discussing in detail things that you wrote at least a year ago.  (I wrote The Possessed between 2005 and 2009… and the first UK edition just came out in 2011.) Reviews treat the finished book as a stable representation of who and what you are as a writer. That’s the critic’s job: taking a literary work as some kind of unity that it’s possible to talk about and interpret.  It’s important and difficult work.

For a writer, however, seeing your work and yourself talked about in that way can be very agitating.  I for example am already prone to thinking and rethinking the past to an unhelpful degree, so reviews send me into an endless loop of unproductive thoughts.  Although I am always delighted to learn that I received a good review (or that any non-reviewer enjoyed anything I wrote), I still prefer not to read even what I know to be very positive reviews.  When you sit down to write, the first huge hurdle you have to get over is self-consciousness. It’s distracting to have a voice in your head—even the world’s most judicious, loving voice—telling you, “Try to wear the green scarf like you did last Thursday—it really brought out your eyes.”

I definitely do recognize that the ideal attitude towards press would be a moderate one. It would be fantastic to be able to read things people write, think, “Hmm, interesting!” and then think about something else. However, because I currently find such moderation impossible, I have to take the more drastic step of just not reading anything. (I do of course come across extracts and quotations sometimes, it’s not like I have to put my eyes out if I see a single word; I just mean that, as a general policy, I don’t click on the links or receive clippings.)

When I tell people that I don’t read reviews, it often seems to leave a terrible impression, or rather a series of terrible misimpressions, which I would like to address for you today.  Here are my perceived top three:

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1.  “You don’t appreciate people who took the time to read your book and write nice things about you!”

Not so! I am enormously grateful to all the hardworking critics who took the time to write nice or critical things about my book. I just don’t feel it’s necessarily beneficial, to me or to them, for me to know all these things in detail.

Furthermore, although I don’t read my own reviews, I do keep an eye out for other reviews by reviewers who I know liked my book.  In this way I discovered a lot of fantastic criticism (by the likes of Dwight Garner, Laura Miller, David Ulin, and Christopher Tayler), and got turned on to a lot of books that were right up my alley and that I might otherwise have missed.

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2.  “Don’t you think you have anything to learn from your critics?”

Absolutely! I just don’t think the best way for me to learn it is by reading reviews. It sounds paradoxical, but that’s really how the human brain is set up: you learn more from 3 inputs than from 75 inputs. For this reason, I think most writers rely for criticism on a relatively small number of trusted readers, including people like editors and agents, whose job includes reading reviews and telling the writers what they need to know.

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3. “Do reviews and interviews per se not matter to you? Do you feel publicity is degrading to literature?”

I’m glad you asked! No, I don’t think those things at all. I’m very grateful that there are readers who like my writing, and I would like to reach as many of them as possible. When it comes to getting the right books into the right hands, nothing is more powerful than the press. And deservedly so!  That’s why, with the help of the heroic Dave Lull, I regularly post reviews here, and put interviews on my Facebook page. I really want information like that to be available to the people for whom it is intended—namely, you guys, current and future readers. Thanks, as always, for your support!

Tags: agents, book reviews, literary criticism, outsourcing, THE POSSESSED, writers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.