The beauty of difficult words.

22 April 2002—“I finished reading chapter three,” Sarah announced. I gripped the telephone just a little more tightly. “I liked it,” she said, her tone just the slightest bit tentative.

I knew it.

“No, really,” she said, “there are good things in it. There are a couple of things that I think could be worked out a bit more. Let’s make time to go over it together.”

Chapter three has given me grief as long as it’s been written. It’s the chapter in which Kent, the protagonist, goes to a Passover seder hosted by one of his professors. I won’t go too much into the details of what happens, but he already feels out of place before he arrives, and by the end he feels much worse. The two things that have given me the most trouble are the seder itself and the professor, who goes from kind and inviting to angry and alienating in the space of thirty-odd pages.

First, the seder. As this is a novel that takes place over the Passover week and attempts to illuminate a lot of the themes of Passover, there’s a fair amount of explanation in it. The trick is to reveal without making it seem like a lecture. Nowhere is this more difficult than at the seder, as I think the event is a sort of key to the entire novel, so the steps of the seder are all important to me. As I work and rework the chapter through several drafts, it still seems like too much religion. I wonder if I’ll put readers off. I don’t want anyone to think I’m proselytizing.

Then, the professor. I have this view of antagonists: they’re not out specifically to block protagonists; rather, they are the protagonists of their own novels, and our protagonists may simply be minor characters in their stories, possibly antagonists, possibly not. Antagonists who exist solely to thwart protagonists usually end up as cartoonish villains. I don’t want cartoonish villains in my novel. Problem is, that kind of seems like where the professor is heading.

Still, maybe the problems weren’t so egregious after all. I try to allow for the idea that writers get too close to what they’re writing, and they often can’t see the story with what the beloved writing instructor Natalie Goldberg calls (borrowing from Zen Buddhism) beginner’s mind. Thus I figured it would be helpful to give the work over to someone who would give it a good critique.

I try to live by a few general principles: one, treat people as they would like to be treated, not as you’d like to be treated; two, no asky no gety; and three, don’t ask any questions if you won’t be able to accept the answers.

That last one is particularly relevant here. If you’re not ready for the potentially harsh light of day, don’t show your work to anyone unless you have a band of sycophants always at the ready. If, on the other hand, you are ready, then give your work to someone (or a few people) you trust, someone you know respects you as an artist, someone you know wants to help you succeed. Everybody else’s opinions should count for shit in terms of how you view your work.

The other part is that some people are just not cut out to give critique. It may be difficult to receive, but it’s just as difficult to give, if not more so. If you’re giving the crit, you have to take a risk that what you say may hurt your writer’s feelings. It helps if you can ask good questions and be constructive in places. It also helps if you can point to things you like, as a way of showing you have confidence your writer can improve problematic areas.

Then there’s the question of who to show your work to, another writer (or fellow artist in whatever medium you use) or someone who doesn’t have similar ambitions. There’s no doubt that another writer can give you invaluable insight into technique and style, as well as simply be supportive since he or she most likely believes in the craft you are pursuing. At the same time, I know I want my novel to reach beyond my circle to the wider one of readers; much as I love and appreciate the world of writers, I’ve always found myself between various worlds, and I’d love to have readers in each one.

By the time it’s ready for publication, I will likely have shown my work to different people and gotten different critiques, based on different people’s strengths. However, for its early forays out of my hands, I wanted to show the novel to someone who is loving, trusting, and honest enough to give me a good overall critique.

So I gave it to Sarah.

It would be nice if, once you gave your work over to your reader to mull, you could put it out of your mind and go on with the rest of your business.

Yeah, well. No matter how much you trust your reader, you don’t really put it out of your mind. You worry. I do, anyway. Each time Sarah announced she had finished a chapter and was ready to talk about it, I tensed up. I know she loves me for who I am, but as writing is such a large part of my life, I want her to like my writing as well. (Therein lies a separate question: how do you separate who a person is from what that person does? Another time, perhaps.)

Fortunately, Sarah really liked the first two chapters. She marked places she thought were particularly successful; she also called out places she felt didn’t work so well. I was frequently taken with how many details she noticed in my writing, and she usually made comments or asked questions that made me see passages from different perspectives. Little areas that had become stubborn and unworkable became fresh again, ready for new molding.

I didn’t really say anything to Sarah about chapter three other than what I disclosed above. So when she came back with her comments, isolating the seder’s religious content as well as the blatancy of the professor’s verbal attack on Kent, I had conflicting feelings: one, disappointed because it meant that I really did have big things to work out in this chapter; the other, kind of happy that I wasn’t so close to the text that I couldn’t recognize the major flaws in it. There were definitely parts that Sarah liked, which was a relief—no one wants to hear that the entirety of one’s work needs greater attention paid to it. I sure as hell don’t, anyway.

But I’m now completely convinced that chapter three needs major work. It was hard to hear that, though in a sense it was freeing, because for whatever reason up to this point I’d been loath to shake it all up, hoping against hope that I was headed the right direction with it, even though I knew deep down that I wasn’t. I may be more able, and perhaps more willing, to listen to that voice as I progress.

What’s more significant to me is that it reflects the way that Sarah and I have found that we’re open and trusting with each other in an uncertain space, when difficult questions need to be asked, when discordant feelings need to come to light. I’m grateful to be able to become vulnerable to her, knowing I can trust her to be open and loving even in conflict.

So yes, I get a little nervous during Sarah’s critiques, but I know she’s helping me, and if someday you read the novel and enjoy it, you’ll partially have her to thank for it. The best part of Sarah’s critiques is that we get to do them while we’re cuddling in bed. You may not be lucky enough to receive critiques in bed, but if you can work it out, I totally recommend it. Don’t worry: if I ask you for a critique someday, I won’t request it be given in bed. That’s reserved for my most cherished reader.

Speaking of which, I think we’re going over chapter four tonight. I hear it’s good news. Gotta go now.