It's Good to Get a Royal Trashing from Time to Time

Back when I was working with Sol Stein (former owner of Stein & Day Publishers and one of the top New York publishers of the 20th Century) in the Chapter One writing group in the early 90s my first year was an unmitigated success. My novel A Gathering of Strangers was a hit with Sol and the rest of the group. One of its scenes even appeared in Sol’s video Stein on Writing, released in 1992.

As that season came to an end, I started thinking about my third novel. Buoyed by the reception of the first novel, it seemed that I could do nothing wrong. I came up with this great idea about an archaeologist in the Mojave Desert who has all sorts of crazy things happen to her. I thought it was fun and strange all at the same time. I wrote and edited, wrote and edited all summer and fall. Problem was I still didn’t know how to tell good writing from bad.

The next January, Sol reconvened the group in Laguna Beach with a few new faces but the same stringent teaching. At the first meeting, I proudly gave the first few chapters of my new manuscript to him and over the next couple of weeks waited for a response.

No response came.

After three weeks of silence, I asked Sol if he had read my chapters.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s not up to your usual standard.” He held up the green ink pen he usually used to edit manuscripts. “There’s so much green ink on it I didn’t want to give it back to you since I still want you to be my friend.”

He clearly didn’t like it and didn’t want to discuss it further.

I went home that night and thought deeply about that book. One key point here is to not fall in love with your work. Something critical was wrong with the book and I would have to fix it. I took another look at my main character and realized that she wasn’t strongly developed and that all the events were just happening around her. The book was written for the events and not the character.

I started from scratch and decided to have the most important characters around her tell me who she was from their perspective. I started with her grandfather, then her grade school teacher, a local newspaper reporter, her new boyfriend, and a few others. I wrote them all in the first person and then added a chapter in the first person from my main character, Angela. I had five first person characters in five chapters.

The next week, I printed them out and at the Monday night meeting handed them to Sol. I figured it would be either very good or very bad.

I waited. That Friday I got a message from Sol to bring a copy of chapter two to the next meeting. He didn’t say why, just bring it.

At the meeting he had me pass the copies out and then asked the group what was different about the chapters. They agreed it was good but had no idea why.

Sol said, “This is an example of a skill we haven’t talked about in this class, the use of voice.” He went on to discuss how the distinct voices of the characters made them real individuals, not just fictional characters. He told me later that when he read the chapters, “They were so good I almost fell off my chair.”

Okay. It was good. I finished writing the new draft and called it Satan’s Angel. It’s in print and available right here on my blog and website.

This was not the first time nor was it the last time something I spent a lot of time on got royally trashed. The experience at the time was not fun although it was easier in the sense that I never saw the actual trashing. To this day I have never seen that old marked up manuscript. Perhaps Sol thought there was nothing salvageable there and why bother to give it back.

All of the times this has happened to me, I’ve used it as a wake-up call that I was letting my skills slip and to ramp up my effort again. Each time that’s what I’ve done and each time it’s paid off handsomely.

I see so many people get a few words of criticism and quit. They are so thin skinned that they go into defensive posture and never listen to the valuable feedback they just got. Most writers, speakers, and business owners who fail have this problem. A trashing is a revelation that something is seriously wrong in your approach and that it must be cured if you are to grow.

Take it as that and you will come back to the fray better than ever. In future stories I will share some more of these incidents and how I reacted to them.

Next time you get royally criticized, don’t ignore it. Embrace it, make it your own, look at what is wrong, and fix it. You’ll be glad you did.