it’s a lonely business: on asking for feedback

Let me get this out of the way: I am a supercilious bitch. I am not, in short, a nice person. My opinion of my own intellect, however, far outweighs my capacity for productive output. It’s not that I think I’m so great, though, but that practically every other person is so goddamn stupid they make me want to chew through my lips in frustration.

In most areas, be it academics or work or some other enterprise, I am an arrogant asshole. And yet, somehow, I manage to have no self-esteem. This, however, is an issue best left to the analysts. What I want to talk about here is critique.

Creative writing, if I can call what I do that, is the first thing I’ve undertaken that I didn’t want to half-ass. I realized very early on that I wanted to get better at this thing. I wanted to learn a craft.

Anyone can learn a craft, of this I am wholly convinced. With practice, repetition, models to imitate and people to interact with. 

These early stages of creativity are brutal. I don’t know if they ever cease to be. But I know that for me, finding supportive, communal, and above all fun places to write, and people to write with, helped immensely.

Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout manner, to the subject of critique, of asking for readers, for feedback, opinions. I have done loads of writing on memes, posting stories a tiny bit at a time as I wrote them into comment boxes. I think some of the best things I’ve ever done came out of this approach, in part because I felt very free, I felt encouraged because someone would nearly always respond, no matter how minutely.

So how do you sustain this momentum when you write without an audience? With ‘the door shut,’ to paraphase Stephen King? I am working on a piece now that is nearing fifteen thousand words, and has the capacity to become perhaps even a novel.

But I still don’t know what it is, what it will become. If it’s lovely or drivel and asshattery of the highest order. And my fear of derailment means I cannot share it until I know these things, because I am still in the story. I have nothing resembling emotional distance, and won’t for months after it’s completed. But how can I complete it, like this, alone?

How do other people handle it? Am I alone in this?

5 months ago  /  1 note