Taking it on the chin

Feedback is a tetchy beast.  It can be affirming or apocalyptic and anything in between.  A response I received this week to the very first draft of two early chapters of the big project I’m currently working on knocked me for six, at least initially.  

There was the dreaded roll call of every single one of my fears about it:  that parts of it was ‘writing by numbers,’ that the voice slipped here and there, that first person might not be the most effective point of view. And then there were the questions: Why are you writing this? What is it about this  story that should make the reader care?  And then the statements:  I’m not sure costume drama is really your style, you are a ‘white middle class guilty person.’ Aren’t you?

At first I was peeved – furious even.  Didn’t this person understand how hard I had worked just to get this far? Didn’t they appreciate the effort I had put in to making what I thought were some big decisions about structure, tone, style, perspective? I kicked against my interlocutor’s own writing – a set of poems that had been presented to me earlier in the year that were so bad I thought they were a joke, so what did they know anyway? Hmmn? But then, once I had put my toys back in the pram and boosted my blood sugar with a mansize portion of humble pie, I got to thinking that 1) they probably had a point about voice and the central narrative question, and 2) that I might just carry on regardless for now and see what happens – all writers get rejections, don’t they?  It’s all part of the job.

I was reminded of Ross Raisin’s advice to be ‘true to your process’ and his words finally started to really make sense – allow yourself to be tugged along by that rope that pulls you from your very gut and urges you to write the story you’ve chosen (or has chosen you). Follow that, and you’ll be right – keep mining through the grey gristle of rock that makes up your first draft until you reach that shaft of a voice, that chamber where the nugget of the story gleams.  I was heartened by the words of Lucy Caldwell who has spoken of the importance of ‘pushing on through’ your first draft, of allowing yourself to be messy and wrong, to keep your editorial facility switched off during that process so that you can explore and maintain a state of openness and wonder as you write.

Of course there are the cynics who will say – ‘quit while you’re ahead, love’ – but I don’t feel inclined to listen to them.  I shan’t be rushing to show off the narrative ore that I might find on future digs for a while to come – instead, I will hoard it until I’ve at least got a cast of something that resembles the ‘thing’ I am trying to create. So perhaps the feedback was affirming after all – it has forced me to question my process and in so doing, to defend and strengthen it for myself. Maybe, I confess, that person has done me a favour.