Opinions Are Like...

Gotcha, didn't I?

I'm not going to complete that thought quite the way you probably expected. You see, I've been following the kerfuffles in the blogosphere over some authors' bad behavior vis-a-vis negative Amazon reviews. While I have no intention of bringing the heated debate here, it's made me realize one of the most important mantras an author can learn after being published is:

Opinions are like backsides: it's best to keep yours to yourself.

Now, I don't mean published authors are enjoined never to express opinions about anything. I think, for example, it's perfectly okay to state their opinions about thong underwear (I hate them), brussel sprouts (am slowly coming around to them), and sushi (yum!).

But when it comes to other people's opinions about your work (aka reviews, particularly the negative ones), it is never a good idea to argue, explain, or otherwise defend yourself, even when the reviewer is clearly wrong. Because just like it's the kid who throws the retaliatory punch on the playground that gets sent the principal's office, when an author responds to a negative review, it never ends well for the author.

Before my first story was published, I worried a lot about how I'd feel about negative reviews. I'm an inveterate fixer, and if someone doesn't like something I've written, my natural impulse is to want to make it better. But a work of fiction, once finished and published, isn't fixable. It is what it is. And I didn't know quite how I'd handle that impotence.

As it turned out, I've only seen one review of the story that could be considered negative. And I'll admit, reading it didn't make me feel great. But it was also a very honest and well-reasoned opinion, and I appreciated that the writer took the time to think about my story and express her feelings about it so clearly. At the same time, however, my impulse was to explain away her criticisms, but I managed to refrain. It wasn't easy, but in the end, the story has to speak for itself, and it didn't speak to her. And that's okay.

To further illustrate my point, I entered Wickedly Ever After in a contest for unpubbeds a while back. It didn't final, and when the scoresheets/comments came back in the mail, I deliberately didn't open them because I didn't want to be discouraged from completing the story by what I found there. Good thing I didn't. I finally got around to opening them yesterday, and the scores and comments were not encouraging. Oh, they weren't horrible, but I'd certainly never have had the audacity to submit the story to Kensington if I'd read that feedback first.

Which just goes to prove--one reader's "meh" is another reader's "fabulous." And you just never know.

It's certainly difficult to separate our personal feelings from our work. We pour so much of ourselves into every page, it's hard not to want everyone to love our every word. Realistically, though, that's not going to happen. Not even the world's greatest writers are universally loved, after all. There is, as they say, no accounting for taste!

YOUR TURN: How do you handle "constructive criticism?" Do you think an author can ever respond to a negative review without coming off badly?

Telling a Good Story

So... even though my book isn't out until Spring 2009 (April is the word on the street these days), I just got my first review! Click here to read Melissa Marr's thoughts on The Forest of Hands and Teeth. A huge thanks to Melissa for taking the time to read and comment on a debut book and thanks to my sister who read me the review over the phone because I was off in the mountains without internet access :)

Anyways, recently the Mavens all talked about those ah-ha moments in writing. As I said then, I get these moments all the time. I can have the same conversation about craft, read the same books on craft, have the same day dreams and each time I'll walk away with something new. The other day I had one of these ah-ha moments I wanted to share :)

I was reading a book and realized that while the writing for much of the book is great, some of the writing is just... writing. It's not great, it's not bad, it's not mundane or boring -- it's just words strung together getting points across. Honestly, I doubt anyone reading those particular passages would have thought anything of the way they were written -- like I said, they were written fine. They didn't stand out as gorgeous prose -- they didn't really stand out at all.

And suddenly I had this ah-ha moment! I realized that the purpose of writing a book is to tell a story (yeah, most of my ah-ha moments tend to also be duh! moments). I realized that sometimes we get so focused in on parts of our books that we forget to stand back and take in the big picture -- we forget to look at the story we're telling.

Sometimes I think it can be easy to focus on internal conflict versus external conflict versus raising the stakes versus showing all five senses that we forget that all of these devices serve to help us tell a compelling story. And I think sometimes you can look at individual scenes of a book and they work, but once put together as a cohesive whole suddenly the story feels off.

Here's a rather timely but odd example... it's March Madness, the season where everyone fills out NCAA brackets and joins office pools to see who wins. I love following the tournament but I never have the time to follow the whole season -- so when it comes to filling out my brackets I have NO idea who to pick. I do it all by gut and who sounds good and whose colors I like. JP was reviewing my choices and finally he said "each game you choose is totally plausible, when you look at your brackets on a game by game basis, it's solid. But overall there's no way you're going anywhere."

I've judged some contests recently where I see this happening -- scene by scene everything makes sense, but when you read the synopsis, when you look at those scenes adding up to become the whole, the story just isn't there -- it doesn't hold together.

So, along with all the myriad other things we remember when writing, don't forget that in the end we're all story tellers. How we tell that story (what devices we chose, the tone, the language, the POV) influences that story, but in the end, it's all about telling a good story.

Preparing for the Harshest Critiques of All

So, what could be worse than a critique from a contest judge or other reader who trashes your manuscript and makes you consider tossing the whole thing in the Microsoft Windows Recycle Bin? A review of your published book, of course!

How could that possibly be worse, you ask? After all, if it's published, that means someone somewhere loved it enough to take a chance on it in the first place. Isn't the fact that you got published validation enough for you? What more proof do you need?

Well, here's why I think it could be worse: it's too late to fix it! At least with a critique from a judge or beta reader, you have an opportunity to correct whatever she found wrong with your story (assuming you don't decide her advice is all wet, of course). But if you get a poor review of your published book and think, "Hey, Mrs. LaughAMinute has a point: my heroine really is too stupid to live and there's a plot hole the size of the Grand Canyon in the first chapter," there's nothing you can do it about it. The thing's already printed and done; there's no going back.

Much as every unpublished author wants to make that leap to being published, to being read, that milestone brings with it a different kind of vulnerability. Before you get published, you worry about whether you're good enough to get published. After you get published, you worry whether you're good enough to stay that way. Is my work really worth $4.50 (or whatever the cover price is) for people to read? Will they feel they got their money's worth or cheated? Will they love me or hate me?

Writing is very personal (or is it for me, at any rate). While my characters and stories aren't about me or my life, they are very much mine. They come from my head and my heart and I'm invested in them. In some fundamental sense, if you don't like my book, maybe it means you don't like me.

Now, I realize that this is rationally untrue! Even if you buy my book and decide it's a complete wallbanger and a rip-off, you probably won't come and toilet paper my house for revenge. (I'm not telling you where I live, anyway, so even if you were considering it...) You might not even hold it against me when my next book comes out. Maybe you'll think the crummy book of mine you read was a fluke and I'm really not as a bad as all that. Even authors whose books I typically love are capable of producing books I don't particularly like, so I'm certainly a firm believer in not assuming a writer is a hack based on one bad book. And even the divine La Nora has a book that's panned now and then, right?

Still, I've been mulling my fear of reviews since about a week after I sold my Jackie Barbosa-branded erotic novella, Carnally Ever After, to Cobblestone Press. For the first week or so, I walked on air. Then, reality hit me! People are going to be reading my story. People I don't know. People I haven't conversed with in email or sat around a table drinking with at the RWA National conference or otherwise interacted with. And now that I have release date, August 17 (yes, just ten short days from now!), I'm doing my best to prepare myself for the inevitable moment when someone says, "Your story sucks."

Now, since I know the Mavens will give me a dope slap if I don't point this out, there is an excerpt from Carnally Ever After in this month's Cobblestone Quarterly newsletter. I didn't know Deanna was going to put it in there until after she'd done so and after Emma Petersen (a fellow Cobblestone author but apparently not a plant, LOL) launched a thread on the Romance Divas Forum gushing over how much she loved it and couldn't wait for the release. This was followed by several more very kind comments by other people (most of whom I've never met) who read the excerpt and liked it, too.

Needless to say, I basked in the glow like the complete hedonist that I am, doing my best Sally Fields imitation ("You like me, you really like me!"). It felt wonderful.

But I still worry about how I'll react to people who don't like it. Mostly because if they don't, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm an inveterate fixer. If something's wrong, I want to make it better. It's just my nature. But Carnally Ever After is already as good as it's ever going to be. It's done now and there's no going back. (And I truly never thought those words would be as terrifying as they actually are!)

If you want to be published, if you want to be read, you have to make the leap of faith and show your stuff to everyone and anyone who wants to look. It's exhilarating and a little scary. As I said on my own blog the other day, it's a bit like getting naked with a guy you really, really like for the first time. It could have a fantastic payoff, but it could also be devastating. (I wasn't going to repeat that particular analogy, but Leigh said she liked it and it does seem very apt.)



That said, I think it's worth the risk! (And I'll let you know for sure in about, oh, three weeks.)

YOUR TURN: If your work has been published, how did you react to poor reviews when you got them? If you haven't been published yet, have you thought at all about what it will be like, both good and bad?

P.S. Posting extra early because I have a fever and I'm going to bed!