The other day my husband and I were finishing dinner for our sons, and I, having come off a high from my current work in progress, which finally hit its sweet spot after two weeks of struggling, said, “I don’t know if I’ve said this recently, but I really, really love what I do.
My husband hears this often; I can’t help but express gratitude for the gift of doing what I love—creating what was not there before. I love the entire process—research, brainstorm, drafting, revising, editing. It feels like a sacred process to me, where truth is mixed purposefully with fiction, reality merges with story, hopes and dreams and affirmations of identity crawl into carefully chosen words. It is, I believe, a great privilege to remind people who they are, to reassure them they are loved, to tell them they are not alone, we belong to each other, we can do hard things, there is hope.
I find exquisite joy and wonder and satisfaction in this act of creation. But that joy and wonder and satisfaction gets challenged when I accidentally consider one tiny little piece of the process: numbers and reviews.
At times in my writer journey, I have created something and put it out there for the world to see, and the numbers have disappointed—there aren’t enough likes, shares, hearts, comments, sales, whatever. Social media and the easy access of Internet often make it difficult for a writer to create without looking at the numbers, and those numbers, at least for me, are like misty clouds fogging up my joy.
Reviews are another beast entirely. My agent, who also wrote and published a book last year, recently shared a twitter thread about how one reviewer of her book kept persistently tagging her in a negative review of the book. The reviewer tagged her multiple times, almost as though she wanted to make sure my agent saw just how much her book was hated.
That’s enough to sometimes make a writer hold all her words close and forget about sharing them with the world. I often wonder if reviewers forget that a writer is a real person, a person who puts pieces of herself into her work, a person who works for months—sometimes years—to finish a project, a person who is full of insecurities and doubts and their own Voices of Doom that stem from their past and trauma and even, perhaps, already-noted reviews.
At the beginning of January, when I returned to work after two weeks of holiday with my family, I picked up a brand new project and I slogged through the writing of it that whole first and second week. Plaguing me was a review I’d read of my first traditionally published book, The Colors of the Rain. It circled through my head and sat near the back of my eyes so every time I closed them, which I do to visualize scenes, those negative words flashed neon bright. The reviewer, an adult, had called my book unbelievable, had said she couldn’t finish it. It didn’t matter that the same day she posted this review a fifteen-year-old boy had thanked me for writing the book because it looked so much like his life and he felt seen and understood and like his experiences mattered. My book validated his life, reminded him that he was worth something greater than what he’d been through.
So after the first two weeks of slogging, I sat down and had a talk with myself. I said, Remember your true audience. They need your book.
And then I got to work.
Not everyone will love what I create. That’s okay. The important thing is that I remember for whom I’m creating, and why, and I leave the rest behind.
Lives can’t be changed by contributions that don’t exist.
(Photo by Emma Matthews on Unsplash)
