This is a blog about dealing with other people’s opinions. You down with OPO? No,me neither, not really, but it’s something that will happen whether you go looking for it or not. I was just speaking about this very topic with my cousin whose gorgeous art photography book is coming out this summer. (You can do an Amazon search for Charise Isis to get details on it.) I told her what I’d learned from Carolyn See’s excellent ‘Making a Literary Life’ in which she advises that you, as a writer/photographer/artist, learn two phrases- Thank you and No Kidding (which can be given different inflections depending on the circumstances.) So if someone comes up and says I read your book and nothing else- which they quite frequently do, stifle the impulse, after that long and uncomfortable pregnant pause, to ask them what they thought of it. Believe me, you don’t really want to know. If they’re effusively positive it still won’t be enough effusiveness and even if it is, you won’t believe them anyway. And if it’s NEGATIVE, even if only slightly, or worse still, sort of BLASE, or cripplingly horrible, downright MEAN- it will pierce you to your very soul.If they don’t offer any kind of opinion, merely say thank you or you’re kidding! in a kind of off-hand way which will almost always make them follow it up with something nice.
I recently ran into a very lovely woman at the grocery store who had been in a writing group with me. After doing a little catching up she mentioned that she had read my book. Actually she prefaced it with, I don’t normally read children’s literature but I read your book. I did not follow Carolyn See’s advice. I replied, humbly, that I hoped she’d enjoyed it. This is one of those replies which endeavors to trap someone into giving you the answer you want to hear. It sounds gracious but in fact it’s meddling with whatever it is they really think. She said after a teeny pause, that she liked it. Ok, she did say she liked it but you know that in my mind the pause was magnified, and I could tell that she hadn’t really liked it all. And then I felt miserable and thought about it all day and this could have been easily averted if I’d just said either Thank you, or No kidding! Writers are tender beasts. We have more in common with actors that I’d like to admit. Who was that one actress- “you like me, you really like me!”I think it was Sally Field and she’s actually incredibly talented. But think how much insecurity was exposed when she made that tearful Oscar speech. The only good opinions I welcome are the ones I get from my sister or my mother and even then I don’t fully believe them. They wouldn’t like my work so much if they didn’t love me and of course they can’t be unprejudiced so their opinion doesn’t really matter.I try to sweep everything away except for the emails and letters I get from kids. Those are pretty hard to ignore whether they loved the book or found it hard to get through, because kids are without caprice and totally honest.
I think the best advice is not to solicit criticism; take a page from Carolyn See and practice those two useful phrases and do not deviate from them; and when criticism comes knocking, don’t answer the door, and don’t look up from the next thing you’re working on. Once the book is published it doesn’t really belong to me anymore and I like to think it can survive on its own very well without any more interference from me or my anxieties.
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