Mentally digging in

I have been work­ing on a new nov­el, with a nag­ging sense that it was not going well. Although I went over it any num­ber of times, I could not fig­ure out what was wrong. The per­fect moment to ask some­one else to read it and give a critique.

That I did, and what came back was a ver­i­ta­ble cas­cade of crit­i­cism. In essence, I was told, the book was total­ly off.

It was not what I expect­ed. To be sure, I knew some­thing was wrong but sure­ly not every­thing. I did what I am always telling oth­ers to do. I didn’t argue. I didn’t defend. Being defen­sive only makes you dig in and sup­port what you might real­ly not want to sup­port. Why defend what is wrong?

What I did was men­tal­ly go over the many crit­i­cisms, and try to under­stand what had gone wrong for this read­er. One thing stuck out: The read­er did not grasp that the sto­ry hap­pened in the past, not the present. My first reaction—honestly—was that response was absurd. Then as I thought about it, I real­ized if the read­er did indeed react that way, all the oth­er crit­i­cisms made sense. That said, that response meant some­thing in my writ­ing was pro­found­ly askew.

Back to the com­put­er. Back to the text. Sure enough, I could see what had gone wrong.  Back to work. The book got better.

Is there a moral here? Per­haps it is this: The writer needs to be as ana­lyt­i­cal of crit­i­cism as the crit­i­cism is ana­lyt­i­cal of your text.