Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive

Twenty-Two Years

Twenty-Two Years One time I went with a friend of a friend to lunch, my treat, so I could pick his brain about feedback. This man was a children’s librarian and aspiring author who had just received a knock-your-socks-off publishing deal for his first novel. I’m talking about the kind of offer the rest of us scribblers fantasize about incessantly when we should be working on our own novels, or at least on our abs. I’m talking hard cover and paperback rights from a major publishing house, a two-book contract, and the one thing that every writer craves more than anything else in the world—an advance large enough to give us an excuse to quit our day jobs. This friend of a friend had already given his notice at story hour. When I spoke with this man about Toxic Feedback, the first thing he did was criticize the title of my book. But right after that he claimed, with quite a bit of assertiveness, that when he was working on his own book he never solicited feedback from anybody. “Never?” I asked. “Never ever,” he assured me, brandishing a knife over his blackened chicken Caesar salad. After all, he explained, how could an outsider possibly have more insight into his book than he did? Never ever. The notion gave me pause. Maybe this friend of a friend had a point. If you are the one who is writing the book, why should you trouble yourself with other people’s opinions? From this man’s perspective, my own book’s premise—that feedback is a terrific resource you should capitalize on throughout the writing process—now seemed entirely stupid, as stupid, for example, as adding Red Dye # to pistachio nuts. Who needs it? Why bother? In the end, you’ll only end up with something unnatural, toxic, and needlessly messy. Suddenly, I experienced a crisis of confidence. My crisis lasted until dessert. As this friend of a friend was enjoying his tiramisu, he casually mentioned that it had taken him twenty-two years to complete his novel. Yes, I had heard him correctly. Twenty-two years. That’s two decades, going on three. Time enough to see five presidents come and go in the Oval Office, the advent of personal computing, and a film version of Charlie’s Angels, plus a sequel. Such a span of time doesn’t necessarily imply any dysfunction in the writer or his work habits (after all, writing is not a race), except for this one additional fact shared by this friend of a friend. During those two decades he labored on his novel, he also experienced extended, want-to-put-your-head-through-the-plaster bouts of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom. Nothing could have cheered me up more. In fact, now I recognized this man as a veritable poster child for Toxic Feedback; the embodiment of my book’s target audience. I understand that novelists, or writers of any kind, need to allow time for their ideas and stories to gestate quietly, without interference from busybody, opinionated feedback providers. I am also not arguing the fact that this man is an excellent writer who should defer to his own editorial judgment during the revision process. But twenty-two years. Think about how much artistic pain he might have avoided, how many other novels he might have produced in those two decades, and how much happier the childhood of his now-grown sons might have been, if he hadn’t been so fanatical about squirreling away his work-in-progress. Despite the cliché, time is not on our side. As this writer said to his own agent, whom he temporarily fired when the woman failed to send his manuscript to publishers at a pace to his liking, “I’m not getting any younger.” Certainly, there will always be dry spells during the writing process. In truth, I think short, agonizing episodes of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom are actually healthy by-products of the creative process; your unconscious ’s way of saying, Hey, Mr. Thinks-He-Knows-Everything, stop pestering me for a while so I can sort out this plot in peace. But I would suggest that extended bouts of writer’s block, self-doubt, and boredom are not a healthy part of the creative process. I am talking about those bleak periods that go on for...