Many years ago, I went to see Kurt Vonnegut speak in a huge auditorium. He was articulate but distant. Oh, how I loved those books as a teen, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five and the whole lot of ‘em. They were a secret kind of knowledge about the world, the way it really was, not in day-to-day, ordinary reality, but unhinged from time and space…Billy Pilgrim. I identified.
One thing he said in particular stuck with me. He said, in answer to a question from the audience, that he wrote mostly with one person in mind, and this person was his sister-in-law. She was the one he would have read it first, the one who’s comments mattered the most. He trusted her taste.
And for me, who spent most of my life writing plays and screenplays, intended not for a single but a large collective audience, this to me seemed like a possible key to reclaiming the narrative voice, the novelist’s voice that I dabbled in as a teen and in my early twenties, that I set aside because I like pictures and sound and moving things nearly as much as words.
Write for one person. Write to be intimate with a reader, the way it felt you were intimate with a beloved writer while reading their work.
But this is one of those pieces of advice that I have unfortunately abused, that I have allowed to become obsessive, to take too much focus, and thus to become dysfunctional.
Because frankly, I value certain people’s opinions too much.
I have not developed a thick enough skin about criticism, and fret about how my work will be received much more than I care to admit, and more than is healthy.
It’s not just that I want to write well and tell a good story for myself (which I do): it’s that I want certain specific people to think it is a good story.
Some of these people, it’s for professional reasons. They are established in the literary world. If they don’t like it, it could limit the life of the work.
For others, it’s because there are hints of the personal in it, even in it’s fiction. I want them to understand it, because I want them to understand me.
I am crushed when they don’t respond to my work, these people. Which, for some reason, seems to happen to me a whole stinking lot outside of this blog. Submission into a big black hole of nothingness. No comments. No rejection. No communication. Long gaps of silence and nothing.
Maybe I should be more aggressive about following up. “Did you read it? What did you think?” But I got tired of “oh, not yet, I’m sorry…” or “I really liked the first few pages” or “I liked it, but didn’t love it.” “I liked it but I’m not going to produce or publish it.”
Those are kind of conversation stoppers,. There’s often the polite, “send me your next thing,” but mostly, I feel like that’s a brush off.
I’m just not convinced that harassing people about it is going to help anything. But I can’t seem to get folks in power into a dialogue about my work.
Oh, the dream of that one pure champion, that one advocate who will take all these things that I’ve written and set them free into the collective consciousness. God, it’s crazy how much I have that is unpublished and unproduced. I have this play…well, that’s another story.
That’s a dream I need to give up on, even as I keep pursuing the work.
I have had this feeling all my life that I’ve had to get around the gatekeepers to succeed. That I would never be able to make it through the traditional routes. So I’ve worked at many things indirectly. This blog is the epitome of indirectness.
I need to lighten up. It’s all just writing. It’s telling a story. And the readership here is as good as any I could hope for.
Okay, please don’t be offended, but I still wish for a little more.
Somehow, I want to get beyond both the personal and professional, and just get up there in front of the audience.
So, Dear Mr. Vonnegut, though I love and respect the heck out of you…I’m not going to model you anymore. I’m not going to pin my hopes on what one person or even a small group of people have to say about what I’ve written, either personally or professionally.
I’m going to write for many people, not just one.
UPDATE
A few weeks months ago now I posted about the status of my novel. I’ve rewritten about a fourth of it and added about 8000 words. The characters and plot are five steps further along then they were in the first draft. A couple more new scenes, a good proof, and I’m sending the darn thing off, 3-5 places, hopefully before Christmas. I do feel like I’m getting closer now, maybe more like in 50/50 believing it will make it to market. But if it doesn’t, that’s okay. I’ve got a plan B. But I won’t talk about that more until these cards are all played through.
Sorry this is so whiny – but it’s a kind of revelation I thought might be useful to share. Thanks in advance for listening. And keep writing, if you’re so inclined.