A Season in Hell: January 4-6, 2022

On feedback; or, you wrote a bad song, Petey

A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.

January 4

One of the deep mysteries about novels, to me, is how much easier it is to read them than it is to write them. When you read a novel you see it with total clarity. It’s easy. You immediately know what’s working and what isn’t. You know when someone’s acting out of character. You see how everything fits together. It’s obvious. It’s right there on the page!

But the second you start writing a novel, a fog descends. Suddenly you’re flying blind, on instruments alone. I have never been as lost and confused in somebody else’s books as I get in my own. How does this relate to that? What would X say when Y happens? Is this bit totally unnecessary? You’re just groping around in the dark. Even while it’s still perfectly obvious to other people what you’re doing wrong. Frankly it’s embarrassing.

January 6

I have notes from my editor.

Actually the notes came several days ago, but because I am a tender baby frog I worried that reading them might derail my “creative process,” so I waited till I’d finished a bunch of revisions before I actually screwed my courage to the sticking point and looked at them.

I strongly admire people who handle feedback well. My wife and many of my friends do; I know this because I give them feedback all the time. But although I freely dish it out, I suck at at taking it. I often need actual meditation before I attain the necessary openness to the universe to accept it with joy. I know that those who give feedback are my allies, and I owe it to them to treat them as such and not as bitter, traitorous enemies. And mostly I do. But not without a struggle.

My creative anti-bodies want to reject the feedback like an incompatible organ transplant. It triggers in me a desire to counter-attack—it trips the hard-coded, irreversible launch sequence on some long-abandoned defensive missile emplacement in my soul. Stop it? But how?! The failsafe codes were lost years ago!

My three stock responses to any feedback are:

1) BUT I ALREADY DID THAT. SEE IT’S RIGHT THERE. SILLY RABBIT, YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION

2) SURE, OF COURSE, THAT’S WHAT I SHOULD DO. BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR THESE NINE REASONS. I WOULD HAVE TO START OVER AND WRITE AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT BOOK. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

3) (this one is silent, for interior monologue only) YEAH, WELL, YOU WOULD THINK THAT

Used separately or in combination these simple phrases will render you proof against any helpful suggestions of any kind.

When it’s safe and warm on my laptop, where only daddy can see, my book seems so strong and full of promise. But when exposed to the elements it suddenly becomes fragile and empty. No, don’t look at it! Even the slightest pressure from somebody’s eye-beams will cause it to collapse like a house of cards (yes, I know it’s a cliché, thank you) into a disappointingly flat pile on the coffee table.

The roots of all this are not a mystery. It’s about shame. I tried so hard, and took so long, and talked about it so much, and somehow I still I wrote a bad thing. And it’s so mortifying that I would rather die—or alienate everyone I know—than admit it.