“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” the saying goes. And when it comes to bad effects — being a loser, suffering a defeat, experiencing an injury — being a nail is not very pleasant.
But we all love being the effect of a good cause — take listening to a wonderful piece of music, for example, or reading a really good book. We willingly pay good money to become the effect of that composer’s music, or that writer’s plot, characters and tension. And if we attend a football game, for example, we experience the effect of our home team’s successful plays, triumphs and wins, and we experience bad effects at their missteps, mistakes or losses.
But in each of these cases the audience is the effect of what others have caused, the music they have created, the drama they have filmed, the passes, catches and triumphs of the home team. The cause points — writers, actors, directors, producers, soloists, musicians, quarterbacks, coaches, running backs etc. — create what we willingly or unwillingly experience at the receipt point.
A writer is essentially a cause point, whether it is an email or text message to a friend, a New York Times bestseller or a book self-published and now available on Amazon.com. Unfortunately, there are individuals who seek to make cause into effect. The sarcastic critic, the putdown artist, those that seek to invalidate what has been created and make the writer, the artist, the actress into an effect. These people feel threatened by creation and seek to squash it, replacing a creator’s work with their own clever putdowns, and ridicule.
In a university writing class, for example, class writing assignments are often read to the class, and then criticized by everyone, most of whom wish to make points through their clever witticisms at the writer’s expense. Thus it should come as no surprise that university writing classes for the most part produce critics not writers.
In such a corrosive environment, the writer must learn to ignore critics. An NPR story for example, recently chronicled famous rejections. The Grand Ole Opry once rejected Elvis Presley. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and many famous books were rejected with caustic comments about the book, the writer’s abilities, and pompous narratives about how nobody would every want to read it. Those rejections are memorable because in each case, the book went on to become a bestseller. But how many promising writers took such rejections of their works to heart and stopped?
Critics resurrect doubts: “Is that publisher right? Am I fooling myself? Am I too close to the story to evaluate it objectively? Sure some good books have been rejected at first, but is my book actually bad?”
Sending a manuscript to a publisher is a bit like sending a child off to school. The writer must do all he or she can to help the child as well as a parent can, must dress the child well, provide a lunch, get him or her on the right bus, and then trust in the child’s innate intelligence and ability to make friends. And what does the parent do if the child is sent home? Throw him or her out of the house? Lock the child up in a room or some closet in shame and humiliation? The parent/writer like that lacks self confidence and should move to some other line of work.
It takes stores of self confidence to write, to market and to persist long enough to produce a sale. An editor or agent can help improve a work of art, can participate in being cause, and an admiring critic can help sales. But when it comes to a comment like “Apparently the author intends it to be funny,” (said by a publisher rejecting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22) or repeated rejections (200 rejections before Louis L’Amour had a book published). In that kind of game, the writer must persist in being cause, and ignore attempts to force him or her back into effect.
Do we really need critics? Not really. With publish-on-demand booming, we can let the marketplace decide what’s good and what isn’t. Most readers know a good book when they see it, and tell their friends. The job now is sorting through the millions of titles to find the gems. And that, unfortunately, requires marketing expertise in addition to good writing.
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