Today I continued working on edit number three. As I sit and relax, just beginning a glass of wine, inspiration strikes. no. Not inspiration for book words. Inspiration for this post.
Prior to the completion of Grand Illusion, the only reviews I had ever received were from some readers – readers who had enjoyed my sports writing work and were fond of what I had written. To that point, no reviews from independent groups. Until I requested one.
To be fair, it is not really a request, it is a service which is paid for. Many may not know this, but Kirkus and many of the review services which we see quoted are paid services. Kirkus is not cheap with a cost of over six-hundred dollars! No matter how good I thought my work was, that was a steep price to pay. That left me with a smaller independent review company.
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, there are some issues with the review – late being a big issue. Another issue is that it certainly does not appear that the reviewer read the book in its entirety because there are some very key plot concepts missing.
Nonetheless, there is some value in the review as well. The first piece of value is in the negativity itself. At first, it really angered me, and then it seemed to do the opposite. It made me question whether writing fiction was something which I still wanted to pursue.
Certainly it would free up even more time, but that was never really an issue. I stay up late and my wife goes to bed early, so time is something of which I have plenty.
But as I sat down tonight, the thought struck me that the negativity is not really about me. The reality is that as an artist, there are some people who simply do not like what I say, how I say it, and what it does when they read my words.
I have a style. Sometimes that style is unorthodox. Some readers prefer a very specific structure, outline, plot arc, character development, etc. Sometimes, however, when trying to say something which has been said a hundred million times, the boundaries have to be pushed. Maybe people do not like the manner in which I choose to push them, but that does not negate the efforts.
I actually like reading some of the lengthier and more pretentious novels. An example is Infinite Jest. It is long, complex, and somewhat pretentious. Something else? Well, David Foster Wallace completely obliterates sentence structure, paragraph structure, even chapter structure. With all of these elements, the book is considered by many to be a work of utter genius. take a look at Amazon, however, and you will see that only 57% of reviewers gave it five stars. A full quarter of reviews gave it three stars or less including fifteen percent which gave it one star.
Pretentious writing turns many, many people off. So too does writing which does not conform to mass expectations.
I wrote my first book, Middle of Nothing, as a labor of love. The topic was deeply meaningful to me and I felt the need to complete the work. My second novel? That was about a story. An incomplete story that I fashioned from a brief moment of my own life into a narrative fiction.
But this latest work became something more. It became my chance to dare to be different. I have this vision of myself; I give everything I have to whichever endeavor I choose to pursue. When I was a long distance runner, I wanted to be the best and I trained my ass off. I did the same as a football player and power lifter. So when I started with this project, I had the same goal. I was going to pour my heart and soul into something that defied the rules. I wanted to create a piece of fiction that was thought provoking more than mass appealing. I wanted to do so with a new weave of words and ideas, rather than relying on the old fashioned way of writing.
But the review, it gave me some ideas of how to take what I have done and improve the work. Yes, it was very depressing to hear a negative review of something to which I had given my heart. But in the end, I found that it could help make that effort more worthwhile. If I can make changes that take the project into more hands, then those goals I had with the project will reach more people.
That is a good thing. That is forward progress.
