Six months after I took my first editing job, at Terrain, I got a phone call from a disgruntled reader. The reader was the mother of the previous editor. The previous editor had given me her job, then left Berkeley for the East Coast. My predecessor’s mother had been getting Terrain in the mail for those few months since her daughter had left the job, found it displeasing, and wanted to cancel her subscription. “It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on,” she told me.
She may have been right. I was a new editor, and almost as new a writer. Still, the remark stung. I replied mildly, hung up, took her name out of the database, and went for a walk until the hurt went away, which turned out not to happen for about two days.
When I first came back to Earth Island Journal, I was hired to make some sweeping changes in the publication. Aside from copy, pretty much every change I made in the magazine was signed off on by Earth Island’s executive directors. But the previous editor had a following, and five years later I still get a fair number of letters telling me that my editing, my writing, and pretty much everything else I do sucks. Here’s a mild example, excerpted from the most recent such letter:
First, I admit I have a problem with your writing. I feel I need a translation of your editorials that appear in each issue…
I feel that you have diverged from the philosophy of founder David Brower, who wanted a hospitable planet for the flora, fauna and scenic wonders he was able to protect. I miss Gar Smith and the far superior Journal he edited which has two to three times the print volume of today’s Journal. And I never had a problem understanding Gar’s editorials or articles, and never read one I couldn’t support.
If the management supports your philosophy it may be time for me to terminate my relationship with the Earth Island Institute.
Do I enjoy receiving letters like this? Not usually, though sometimes they’re hilariously clueless.
Would I prefer not to get them? No way.
The warm glow of praise from people who admire your writing is a wonderful thing. I am luckier than many writers: I have a community of readers on this blog who are humblingly generous in their praise, and in their constructive criticism as well. And next time I complain about not getting enough comments, y’all are free to remind me of the nature of the comments I do get. But if all I got was that warm praise, as lovely as it is, I would consider myself a failure as a writer. (I am here including editing as a form of writing.)
There is a storm raging on a number of feminist-oriented blogs right now, an unpleasant series of arguments on a topic on which I have no strong opinions other than that coercion, physical or economic, is a bad thing, and that debasement is a form of coercion. There are two main sides, each of them with a number of reasonable (if upset) adherents, a few adherents who seem to me to be arguing sloppily, and one or two who are just arguing in palpable bad faith. (In other words, a typical day on teh internets.) And the topic is important, but this argument might well be happening about any number of emotional topics, and I don’t wish to address the particulars of that argument here, because who needs it?
But at the center of the argument on one side is an implicit question. That question: if a person writes publicly about a private, personal aspect of her life, or a personal choice she has made, does she have a right not to be criticized by her putative allies?
That’s easy to answer.
No.
Nor does she have a right not to be misinterpreted, mocked, derided, piled upon, dropped from blogrolls, insulted, or fisked, even nastily.
Once you write your ideas, they become the common property of humanity. Not that anyone other than Michael Jackson or Disney can profit financially from your words without your consent, mind you. But you lose, in the act of publishing your words, the right to control how people respond to them. This is a good thing. Were it not for your losing control of the response to your words, you yourself would not be able to write about anything that matters. No responses to antifeminist diatribes, no ruminations on poetry or music, no answering flirty letters from your blogcrushes, no outraged defenses aimed at those you feel have misinterpreted what you wrote.
To write is to provoke reaction. One hopes that all the negative response your writing gets will be constructive and fair, but that just happens really fucking rarely. The drive-by insults are easy enough to deal with. Misinterpretations are more troublesome, and misinterpretation is in the eye of the beholder. There are misinterpretations that occur because the reader is sloppy, or drunk, or agenda-driven, or not entirely literate. And there are misinterpretations that happen because the writer did a bad job. It’s tempting to ascribe the really annoying or hurtful misinterpretations to the first category, and yet that assumption is the field mark of piss-poor, careless writing. It’s best for the writer to assume misinterpretations are her fault, at least at first. Is that blaming the victim? Maybe. But if your writing is careless, it may be the reader who’s the real victim. If you’re writing to communicate, assuming the misinterpretations are your fault until it’s demonstrated otherwise helps you hone your skills. If you’re writing not to communicate, but rather merely to conduct destructive testing on keyboards, why publish at all?
“But they shouldn’t pile on,” say a number of combatants in the current battle, “because what does piling on do to solidarity?” There is a small degree to which this is an appropriate criticism: a minor, 25-reader-a-week writer really might not expect to have her casually-tossed-off thoughts scrutinized by the entire online world. And yet — and I say this fully aware that charges of condescension have already been flung in all directions in this meta-argument — the expectation that those words won’t be raked over the coals is a form of naïvete. Wonks estimate the Internet now has more than a billion users. The old saying had it that you should never email anything you didn’t want your grandmother to read on the front page of the New York Times. (OK, that’s a portmanteau of two old sayings. You get the point.) If you write something you don’t want a billion people to read, don’t put it on a publicly accessible Web page.
But the notion that written criticism should be squelched for fear of undermining solidarity? That is a notion that would be perfectly at home in Donald Rumsfeld’s brain. I haven’t weighed in on the particulars of the subject, and I ain’t gonna. But if you tell writers not to write because you don’t like the political ramifications of their writing, you are my enemy, and I don’t give a flying fuck whether I agree with your politics or not.
I understand how much it sucks to get piled on when you’re not used to it. New writers often have a thin skin. Some old writers do as well. The net has allowed lots of people who never considered themselves writers to become widely read. That’s a wonderful thing. But it doesn’t change an important fact: people will almost certainly respond to your writing in ways you neither anticipate nor enjoy. If they don’t, it means they’re not reading your work. This is a feature, not a bug. I’ve learned more about writing well from one cutting comment than from a hundred glowing backpats. Pronghorn are fleet of foot because cheetahs ate all the slow ones for tens of thousands of years.
But if you can’t handle that, there’s another old saying that’s relevant, about heat and kitchens and egress therefrom. Do your writing in a blank book, and then put it on a shelf where no one will ever see it. Or make your LiveJournal “friends only.” You’ll be happier, and so will those of us who might have been castigated for pointing out where you go horribly wrong.
1 comment on "The price of writing for the public"
But the notion that written criticism should be squelched for fear of undermining solidarity? That is a notion that would be perfectly at home in Donald Rumsfeld’s brain. I haven’t weighed in on the particulars of the subject, and I ain’t gonna. But if you tell writers not to write because you don’t like the political ramifications of their writing, you are my enemy, and I don’t give a flying fuck whether I agree with your politics or not.
A-FUCKING-MEN.