Years ago, a member of my extended family asked to read one of my stories, and so I gave her one.
When we spoke next, to sum it all up, she pointed out connections my story made to my personal life.
For example, she explained how–like one of the characters in my story–my mom had purchased an item from a television infomercial. She also was quick to point out a typo I’d made.
At the time, I had just begun to take writing seriously, but even then, this conversation didn’t sit well with me. I had no idea my mom had purchased such an item, for one thing. It felt as if this person was trying to pick apart and rationalize a story I had crafted out of imagination, out of a creative trance, out of “the zone.” Her statements functioned under the assumption that the process of writing fiction was strictly limited to a writer’s personal life experiences.
Ann Beattie addresses this in Frederick Busch’s Letters to a Fiction Writer. (If you’ve never read this book, I’ve previously blogged about it here.) She writes:
People want to think what you do is not magical. That it is not far removed from the kind of thinking, and imagining, they themselves experience.
To compound the problem, this was someone who had her own aspirations with writing a novel; she just “didn’t have the time.”
Beattie also addresses this:
People who do not write will tell you that they haven’t gotten around to it yet because they know they can do it. They just need to get the kids in school, hire a lawn service and spend weekends writing, recycle their notebook into useable material, make a concerted effort to remember their dreams. It can be done tomorrow. Any time.
As writers, we need to be careful with whom we allow to read our work-in-progress.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like all writers need two kinds of readers: one set of readers who will continually praise anything we write and another set of readers who will give us raw, intelligent feedback with how to improve our stories.
Not all of our friends and family members will fall under either of these two categories. It’s dangerous to assume otherwise, regardless of all of their good intentions.
Why or why not? Please leave me a comment below.
And as always, write your heart out.
