Why writers need ticked-off readers
APR
27
My friend Nina and I were halfway through lunch when she mentioned the letter in this month's MORE magazine. Top of the page, she said. Headlined "Granny dearest." All about me and the "appalling" attitude I'd shown in my essay on becoming a grandmother. Some reader had her knickers in a knot because I had admitted to some mixed emotions over a toddler's presence in my home all weekend, every weekend. "What really got her going," Nina said, "was that line about Chardonnay and Ella Fitzgerald."
Oh, right! A few months of dining to the Teletubbies theme tune, with the scent of Kraft Dinner in the air, had kindled a burst of nostalgia for Ella. My critic didn't actually call me a spoiled, self-indulgent narcissist with no right to an adorable grandchild, but that's apparently what she was thinking. I put down my fork, stopped in mid-bite by a shiver of something I couldn't name. I just had to see that letter for myself---to meditate on every finger-wagging word and feel the chill of a stranger's judgment.
If you're one of those writers who take stands on incendiary issues, angry letters just prove that you're doing your job. You attract such a clamour of outrage that no single voice gives you pause. Because I write about lessons drawn from ordinary life, I've grown accustomed to more heartening feedback. I keep an overstuffed file of letters, dating back at least 20 years, from readers who say that my words changed their life. "Your article inspired me to leave my abusive husband," a reader will say. Or "When I read that you'd recovered from depression, I realized there was hope for me." Then there's the woman who recognized her family in My Mother's Daughter, shared the book with her sisters and convened a wine-soaked dinner to share the new insights my story had sparked.
It all adds up to the biggest buzz I've known in the storytelling game---and my reward for not choosing a more sensible career, like tax law. I ask you: how many tax lawyers see ongoing proof that their work is brightening a corner of the world?
I might start to get annoyingly complacent if not for my ticked-off readers. Their aggrieved, insistent voices remind me that not everyone shares my take on things. However they frame their complaint, it always seems to have a subtext---a sour, despondent sense of being left behind. When a newspaper excerpted My Mother's Daughter, I received a hectoring e-mail from a middle-aged man who began, "If the only way you can win your competition with your mother is to insult her in print and in public where she can't answer for herself, I feel truly sorry for you."
I was tempted to hit the delete key. But I found myself wondering who this man was, and what had moved him to track me down. Oh, the wonders of Google! He turned out to be an economist and a published author himself. In the virtual exchange that followed, I learned that he hadn't read my book (surprise!). And that he had a very personal reason for taking offense---uneasy relationships with adult children who held grudges against their father. He wrote, "My parents, too, were not perfect, but having now had two kids of my own, I understand my own imperfections are as bad as, or worse than, theirs ever were."
So what about this latest barb from a stranger? After lunch with Nina, I hot-footed it over to the closest newsstand and flipped to the "Granny Dearest" letter. As denunciations go, it was small-time stuff. I'm "in denial," the writer says. I don't understand that children "hold what is dear in life" and "should never be seen as an inconvenience." It struck me that 20 or 30 years ago, this reader might have been at home with small children while I was dropping my son off at day care. That perhaps at some party or other, she'd been asked, "What do you do?", then been cold-shouldered when she said, "I'm a mother." I'll never know for sure but I know this woman has a story. And if I meditate on it, I just might see the glimmer of an idea.
Posted by Rona April 27, 2009 @ 7:00 AM. File in The writing life
Your comments
April 27, 2009 at 1:01PM
So after sincerely contemplating or meditating on the messages of those aggrieved, insistent voices, consider these words I've just discovered from Emerson (what a wise-guy he was, eh?): "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
And, by the way, Rona, words you wrote back in May, 1996, inspired ME and changed MY life, and the ripple effect of that piece continues to this very day. So there ya go! :)
Nina
April 27, 2009 at 2:02 PM
April 27, 2009 at 9:09PM
April 28, 2009 at 8:08 AM
April 28, 2009 at 2:02PM
And I have to add that speakers also need ticked-off audience members, even though we may not appreciate their comments at the time. In my early career I worried more about this than I do now, thanks to someone who once wrote on the feedback sheet, "She should have worn a different colour suit". When I read that I laughed, and recalled my mother's often repeated advice to "consider the source!" If they so far missed my message that they could only criticize my wardrobe, then the loss was more theirs than mine.
Keep telling it like it is, Rona!
April 28, 2009 at 2:02 PM
April 29, 2009 at 1:01AM
This just goes to reinforce the notion that you can't please everyone all of the time, and not everyone is on the same page in life at exactly the same time. Criticisms, like most things negative in this life, cannot be avoided and will come about at some point in time.
After a certain age, I developed a rather thick skin and don't allow negative criticism to bother me any longer. No one else, besides myself , pays my bills, feeds me, or takes care of me in any other capacity, and if they don't like the way I am living or anything else going on in my life, they can literally kiss my behind! When these so called self righteous critics and are financially responsible for me, then they can dictate what goes on in my life.
Opinions are like rear ends, we all have them and each of them are different. Some people have a more intelligent method of getting their opinions across than others. The rest of them come across as illiterate and uneducated wannabes.
April 29, 2009 at 8:08AM
I was further taught any emotional response, voiced positively or negatively, was evidence of a strong connection made. I was told if connecting was my goal when writing in a public forum I should attempt to weigh any resulting praise or criticism evenly. Both were equally correct and incorrect, having in common with memories their own sets of experiential and emotional filters.
I realize I can always use the additional confidence words of praise bring with them, but it is criticism that triggers introspective growth more often than not. Thank you for the reminder today of that important lesson.
April 28, 2009 at 8:08 AM
April 30, 2009 at 5:05PM
April 30, 2009 at 5:05 PM
June 19, 2009 at 11:11AM
(My word verification here: feeble. Ha!)
Since all roads lead to Rome, my difficulty in accepting criticism goes back (sigh) to the unceasing hostility I found in my childhood and youth. Criticism was savage, intensely personal, and since all boundaries fluctuated from minute to minute, I was never certain what the response to something I did, said, or was, might be. I continue to work on this. There is something remarkably freeing about writing under a pseudonymous blogging name. In a long talk last week with the one member of my family of origin with whom I have a real , ongoing relationship, I mentioned how easy it was to write as Mrs. Biscuitbarrel, rather than under my maiden or married names.
"Stay Mrs. Biscuitbarrel, then," the wise man advised. Well, for now. When I burst out of my chrysalis, it will be under the name I used to use, my birth name.
Congratulations again on the new grandson. I can't tell you how lucky they are to have you and your husband: real, present, functioning grandparents! I could just smell the Kraft dinner! My children have one pair of grandparents (one since deceased) they see, or saw, on occasion, and everything's fine but remote, and one pair (one member since deceased) that they never saw. That took some explaining. When my middle son, the one with the most finely tuned attenae, was eight, he asked me, "Do you have a father?" I said that I did. "Do we like him?" he persisted.
April 28, 2009 at 2:02 PM
July 02, 2009 at 4:04PM
When I was first published -- mostly letters-to-the-editor -- I stayed awake nights revisiting every line and word I had mailed off. The teeniest reader criticism floored my ego for weeks.
After years as a columnist, I agree -- if I'm not upsetting somebody, I'm not doing the job I'm paid for. I live by two quotes: "Never ignore or forget any bit of praise for your writing, deserved or not. Praise possesses excellent restorative properties, particularly for the writer of humor." Patrick F. McManus, author of The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into Writing Humor. And "If a few people shoot at you, why feel you"re crap?" John Travolta, interviewed on The Actors' Studio.
April 28, 2009 at 3:03 PM