Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

There are several things that, in younger years, I might have done with such a scathing critique as I received last week from Jefferson Smith’s Immerse or Die report.

(If you’ve just joined, Part 1 of this conversation can be found here.)

Most of these reactions are defensive in nature and, as such, they bring nothing to the table aside from their protective value. As I enter my dotage, I can safely say that one thing I’ know is this:

I can always learn if I want to do so, and I will never learn when I don’t.

And in this case, I want to.

So, here’s what I will not be doing in response to my IoD Smackdown.
(Writers: Pay close attention to Item #4 on the list.)

1. The Hand-Waving Whatev Response

The first and easiest reaction is to blow air through my lips and dismiss the results entirely. It’s not a bad tactic. It’s efficient. It’s quick. It’s utterly comprehensive. All I have to do is roll my eyes and wave my hands and poof! Troubles are gone.

Obviously, I can learn nothing if I ignore feedback, so this is a little less than optimal.

2. The Yeah-But Response

Another deflection tactic is to explain away the uncomfortable result. I can do this by justifying my writing choices, but this has an insidious side-effect. Each time I defend my prose against criticism, I entrench my position a little more. This means that each time I do this, I become less open to change, become more convinced of my correctness, and I move myself deeper into “victim” territory. The logical end result of this is a writer who is convinced of his massive talent and the perfection of his prose, and I’ve met enough of these writers already: scribblers who rail against the system and, touting their own genius, speak of how the “gatekeepers” aren’t worthy to read such brilliance. I don’t want to become one of them.

Another tactic is to belittle the source. “He’s an idiot” and “He doesn’t understand the genre” are prime examples of this technique, but if that’s the case, then why would I have asked that person for feedback in the first place? I’ve been reading Smith’s IoD reports for over a month, now, and I have not seen him to be clueless in any regard. Why, then, would it make any sense for me to assume that he’s suddenly lost all credibility?

The difficulty with the Yeah-But Reponse is that, well, sometimes it is the thing to do. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason to break a rule, and sometimes the critic does get it wrong. So a blanket Yeah-But Response is rarely justified. However, neither is its opposite.

Which brings us to…

3. The Chicken Little Response

This…yeah, this.

This has always been my immediate response, my truly visceral reaction, and I gave it full voice in Part 1 of this series. When faced with harsh criticism from a source I have already deemed credible, my initial reaction can be summed up in three words: I can’t write. I’ve abandoned efforts to prevent myself from reacting this way; as I said, it’s a visceral reaction, not a conscious one. Experience has taught me to just let it play out, and work to keep it from consuming me in the interim.

The longer-term corollary to this, though, is assigning too much weight to a given critique, and that’s a real danger. In receiving any critique, it is important to keep things in perspective, as well as to recognize the scope of the comments.

In the case of Smith’s IoD report, it comes down to two things. First, this is only one person out of many who have read, edited, and reviewed the book and, just as I cannot explain away Smith’s remarks, so too must I keep faith with the other feedback I’ve received. Giving too much weight to one reviewer diminishes all others. Second, I must remember that this is only a critique of the opening of the book, and is not a condemnation of the book as a whole. While the opening of a book is of great importance (“holy ground,” in Smith’s view), it is not the whole book.

4. Knee-Jerk Rewrite Response

This is by far the most dangerous reaction to criticism for any writer: the instinctive compulsion to rewrite an already published work, or worse, to go and rewrite everything you’ve ever written.

Such a reaction is more common today, I believe, than it was before the surge in self-publishing. It’s just too easy to publish a story, re-edit it, and upload a new version time and time again. While it is important to evaluate any criticism and perhaps test out fixes, there is limited value in rewriting everything you’ve ever written in reaction to a lesson newly learned.

While I will most likely try my hand at reworking the opening of the book IoD critiqued, I will not rewrite the entire book, and I will definitely not put an updated/revised edition of the book on the market.

Instead, the best use of new knowledge is, as always, to apply it to the next project.

And that’s my plan.

Next post, specifics on why I got spanked, and how to correct the issues raised during said spanking.

k