And you thought people hated your writing...

Did any of you read The Book Examiner's 50 Best Author vs. Author Put-downs of All Time?


I just have to include a few here, because I found them oddly encouraging. They point to one important fact: you can't please everyone.

Case in point, here's what Mark Twain had to say about Jane Austen (my favorite author of all time, incidentally--though ironically Mark Twain is up there, too...):
"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

And then we have William Faulkner's take on Twain:
"A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."

And Ernest Hemingway on Faulkner:
"Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one."

How about Vladimir Nabokov on Hemingway:
"As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it."

How can this handful of meanness be inspiring? Because it reminds me that before worrying about what other people think, I need to write a book that I am satisfied with. If you don't like your own work, consider it important--if you are not confident that you have written something good, beautiful and true--you cannot expect it to please anyone else. But if you do have that inner surety, harsh critiques, rejection, bad reviews, etc. will all fall into perspective.

I know, marketability is important. But a good story is more important.
An understanding of readership is essential. But a believable, lovable character is quintessential.
Finding an editor may be your aim, but your first aim should be finding your voice, finding your character, finding yourself.

I'll leave you with one last reassurance: you're not likely to ever receive a critique this nasty, a la George Bernard Shaw...

"With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity."

Hmmm.... Luckily Shakespeare wasn't thinking about what nasty critics might say when he wrote King Lear. And I doubt that Jane Austen worried herself much over future put-downs while she created one of the most beloved characters of literary history.

I guess if someone wants to dig us up hundreds of years after we die just to mock us to our skeletons, we'll at least be in good company.