Archive for the ‘Criticism’ Category

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Confidence

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

The worst thing that could happen to writer is not a bad review, poor sales, or a rejection letter, but to lose his confidence. Without his confidence, he cannot actually write. Instead, he will chase his own confidence across the page in words and sentences, but he will not catch it. It cannot be caught. To think that it can be caught is to lose sight of it again.

I sometimes coach individual writers. Always the first thing these writers want me to do is read their work. They will say this is a practical thing to do, that I might fix their sentences as a tennis coach fixes his student’s swing. But this is usually not what they want. They are hoping my reading their work will give them confidence. Unfortunately, having someone read your work is the last thing that will bring you confidence.

From time to time someone will read something I have written and they will let me know how much they liked it. This is lovely, of course, but then a time will come when I am not feeling my confidence, and I might make the mistake of turning in my memory to those kind words. In that moment I have only traveled further from what I seek. And if my work has been criticized, and if I am not feeling my confidence, I might use that criticism like a whip to punish me back to where I belong.

Where I belong is a place where even the memory of whips does not exist. Here, praise has no meaning either. Within my confidence there is only the gem of love, a thing of value that offers itself for the price of my attention. Nothing else exists there. To see anything else is to fabricate what will only crumble under the weight of time and be called worthless, as all the gifts we give one another must some day. Our confidence was never anyone’s to give; it was only ours to be remembered.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
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Lay Down Your Swords

Friday, August 24th, 2012

I have written a number of times in this space about certain teachers and mentor-types who, during my formative high school days, told me in one way or another, “You are not a good writer and you do not understand what good writing is.” The message seemed clear: do something else. These remarks came often enough, by which I mean about once a year, that I felt as if there was a spot on my ego like a toe that had been banged so often it was never allowed to heal.

Despite the criticism, I left high school as determined as ever to be a writer. My first semester in college I was required to take Composition 101. I liked the professor very much. He was funny, cheery, articulate, learned, and had none of the crushing disenchantment to which small town inner city high school teachers are susceptible.

One of our first assignments was to write a “descriptive essay.” By way of explanation the professor produced some yellowed pages and proceeded to read aloud from what he described as the best descriptive essay he had ever received. I have to admit I was editing this piece in my head as I was listening to it, thinking, “That’s a bit overdone.”

On the day the professor was to hand the papers back I came to class dressed all in white. This was how I was back then. He stood in front of the class and said how he had been teaching composition for fifteen years, and in fifteen years he had never received a descriptive piece as good as what he was about to share. He then read my essay aloud, every word of it, pointing out all the many examples “good writing.”

My writer’s ego went into diabetic shock. He was saying everything I had ever wanted a teacher or mentor to say about my work. And this wasn’t some rinky-dink, depressed, high school English teacher; this was a university professor with a pleasant southern accent and a mildly dirty sense of humor. Case closed, yes? Just as in the movies, all the past hurt is wiped clean in one triumphant victory.

Unfortunately, if you live by the sword of opinion, then you die by the sword of opinion. If I am a good writer one day because my professor says I am, then I am a bad writer the next because the college literary editor says I am not. I wish I could remember the exact day I stopped tethering my work’s value to someone else’s opinion as well as I can remember all that praise and criticism, but I cannot. I cannot, because there never was such a moment. I started out not caring, as do we all. That tethering had to be learned, a useless attempt to stave off the perceived loneliness born of asking yourself a question that only you can answer.

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Heresy

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

During the one writing class I took as an adult, our professor instructed us to read and analyze The Great Gatsby as if it were a manuscript we had just been handed by our classmates. In other words, take the novel down off the shelf where canonized works are preserved and see it for what it was – a story written by a human being, a professional writer, who did not know at the time he had penned The Great American Novel.

That was the plan anyway, but what followed was two weeks of serialized extolling of Fitzgerald’s literary perfection. Admittedly, I wasn’t entirely opposed to this. I quite liked the book on a number of levels, and I found the concept of literary perfection appealing. After all, if the reading world could agree that Fitzgerald had been perfect – for one book at least – why not Kenower? What a tempting destination, Perfection. There and there alone could I stand protected from the arrows of criticism, whose repeated sting, I was certain, had forced me into a bunker of my own design.

This class was my first tentative step out of that bunker. I suppose it was for this reason I found myself bristling during one of our Gatsby sessions. We had come to the scene where Gatsby is showing Daisy and Nick around his mansion and begins showering them with his silken, multi-colored shirts. As the shirts rain down on Daisy, she clutches at one and says breathlessly, “They’re just so beautiful.”

This moment posed a problem for the class. Daisy’s remarks seemed a bit melodramatic and out of sync with the rest of the scene. The instructor and my classmates began floating theories explaining why Daisy’s remarks were as perfect as the rest of the book. It was at this time that I recalled our supposed purpose in reading Gatsby. I raised my hand to join the discussion.

“Maybe,” I offered, “it was a just a choice he made that really didn’t work but that he and Perkins left in because at the time they thought it did work.”

My remark was met with silence from my classmates and a confused stare from my instructor. I let the matter drop. Though I never took a poll, I would have bet we were a devoutly secular bunch in that class. Yet we weren’t. We had traded in one religion and its pantheon of saints for another. It wasn’t until that moment that I understood how accidental and benign heresy was. Sometimes without intending to you slip and perceive your own divinity through the cracks of our necessarily imperfect creations.

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The Divide

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

It was the first and only writing class I would take in my adult life, and there I was, having written for over fifteen years, about to read my fiction aloud to strangers for the first time. I had written and performed my own theatrical production, I had given poetry readings – but no matter. This was a very autobiographical novel – the first of its kind I had ever attempted – and it was the first book I had written that I felt really sounded like me. What would it mean if no one liked it?

I read my pages, set them down, and waited. As always, the work was greeted by silence. Who would be the first to speak? Who would risk offering his or her opinion if no one else agreed with it? Finally Amanda, a very bright psychologist/novelist spoke up:

“I don’t get it. What’s the narrator so upset about?”

And then another: “I don’t get it either.  It’s like there’s no plot.”

And then another: “I couldn’t really follow it. So the narrator’s upset because his girlfriend left?  That’s it? I don’t get it.”

On and on until half the class had spoken, and half the class didn’t get it. I checked my pulse: I was still alive. That was something.

And then, from behind me, Nick cleared his throat. Nick was the most experimental writer in the class, the most surreal. Sometimes when Nick spoke, his voice warbled a bit, as though someone had just finished choking him.

“I don’t know,” he warbled. “I liked it.”

Then Asa. “So did I! It was funny.”

And then Pete: “I didn’t care that there wasn’t much of a plot. I just like listening to the narrator.”

When it was over, the class was evenly divided: A perfect result. I was back exactly where I had begun, having to decide, just like my classmates, if I was willing to use my voice whether anyone agreed with what that voice said or not.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Gods and Critics

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

When I was 21 my girlfriend was attending Brown University where she had enrolled in a class called The History of Rock and Roll. The only textbook was Rolling Stone’s Guide to Rock and Roll. Being a big music fan, I thumbed through the Guide, and discovered that Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones were great! Everyone else? Meh.

The editors’ disappointment with the Everyone Else’s was relentless. David Bowie? Pretentious. Simon and Garfunkle? Overwritten. Pink Floyd? Self-indulgent. The Moody Blues? Please. On and on and on. The more I read, the more depressed I became. It seemed to me that if you didn’t change the face of music, you were a failure.

I would remember the Guide years later when I uncovered a recording of John Lennon berating an editor of Rolling Stone. He felt the magazine had simply not given The Beatles enough credit for how they’d evolved over the years, and he was really mad about it. “Really mad about it” were his exact words. He accused Rolling Stone of snobbery, that The Beatles’ crime had been their popularity.

I have to admit I felt for the editor. I agreed with Lennon intellectually, but he was really giving it to the poor guy, and I sensed the editor was experiencing what an eight year-old might if Santa told him to his face that he had been quite, quite naughty.

Strange that Lennon would think The Beatles had not gotten enough credit, but the mind is amazingly agile in its ability to twist reality into any shape, and the ego’s hunger for praise is literally insatiable. Maybe that tongue-lashing was just what that editor needed. He got to see Lennon, a music God, as the human he always had been. Perhaps from that day forward the editor would be a little kinder, remembering that all those artists whose work he had been asked to judge are exactly as human as he.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Last Laugh

Monday, January 9th, 2012

Last night, my youngest son and I watched the documentary The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. My son has recently taken an interest in other people’s failings, having discovered humanity’s capacity to bond over mutual disgust. As a boy who has come late to friend-making, he is always on the lookout for the quickest way to cross the divide between himself and anyone else. I guess nothing says you’re amongst friends quicker than agreeing how stupid some other guy is.

So we hunkered down to have a good snark. For all of my son’s desire to revel in how bad something is, he is also a bit of a naïf, even for a twelve year-old. Thus, as we watched clips of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Frankenstein VS The Space Monster, he would turn to me and ask, “Why is that so bad?”

And my heart would sink. Suddenly, explaining to my sweet-hearted boy why something someone else made stunk was not so appealing. It started feeling like teaching him racism. It’s one thing to say, “My willing suspension of disbelief is challenged by the presence of a boom mic in the shot,” or, “I’m not feeling that Frankenstein really wants to battle the space alien,” and it’s another thing to point and laugh at someone who made the mistake of doing something less than perfectly. Yes, in these instances, much less than perfectly, but aren’t we only talking about degrees?

Don’t get me wrong. Part of how we learn is by recognizing what we feel works and doesn’t work in other people’s stories. But I don’t think artists should race to label something someone else made as “bad”, as if all works of art could have their value measured like a temperature. In doing so, you introduce the concept that there exists some external metric to measure something’s worth. Since this metric is illusory, it can easily become a diabolical weapon for your ego to wield against you in times of uncertainty.

Everything deserves to be made if someone wants to make it. Not everyone has to read it or watch it, and certainly everyone doesn’t have to like it, but that does not mean it shouldn’t exist. Let he who is without sin, I say, because the one they may be laughing at someday could be me.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Questioning

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Not long ago I watched an interview John Updike conducted with the New York Times a year or two before he died. The subject of Updike’s age came up relative to his writing ability. “This is why I’m still writing short stories and submitting them to The New Yorker,” said the old literary giant. “It’s good to know I can still do it.”

I fully understand the appeal of passing a test. I may not be in my seventies, but I understand wanting to feel vital and relevant. As a writer, I fully understand the short thrill of the concrete, external validation that is an acceptance letter. But at what point do we get to stop asking this stupid question? After all, wasn’t Updike’s question merely a variation on the very same question any writer could ask the first time he sits down to write his first short story: “Can I do it?”

How worthless that question and how worthless the answer.  Hadn’t Updike heard the answer hundreds of times before? Hadn’t he heard the answer when he won his first and then his second Pulitzer? Hadn’t he heard it with each of the twenty or so novels he published, to say nothing of the hundreds of short stories? How many times must a question be answered before we understand it never should have been asked in the first place?

I would like to tell you that I have never asked that stupid question, but I have, and too many times to count. I have asked it and heard every answer from no to yes to every shade in between. And still I ask it again under the veil of some new story, some new challenge. The answer never means anything. Yes or no, I am always left where I began: asking myself what I would like to try next.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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A Critic Is Born

Monday, September 5th, 2011

It was 1983 and my friends and I had just watched Apocalypse Now at the Avon Cinema in Providence. We were all in high school but we were bright-ish and artsy and our conversation bubbled with post-movie opinion.

One opinion stood out to me that evening. Tony, who was a year younger than I but headed to Harvard after only three years of high school, was particularly focused in his assessment. “That is a great film,” he said with an authority that seemed beyond his years. “A really great film.  And it would have been even greater without all that bullshit philosophy at the end.”

I can still see Tony marching beside me, head down, talking seriously about the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Tony and I were not close friends, but we were a part of the same crowd and saw each other frequently enough—and as well as I knew him this moment seemed uniquely Tony. That same summer I had dropped by his house to visit a mutual friend who was staying with him, and I began singing “Boys,” a David Bowie song with which I had just become familiar.

“That’s a great song,” Tony said, again with that same preternatural authority. I felt vaguely proud that I liked a song that Tony identified as great. It mattered to Tony that a song or a movie was great. It mattered to Tony that he say so. “Why does it matter to him so much?” I wondered.

Years went by, and Tony went to Harvard and I did not. I lost track of him. I moved to Seattle and started writing books. One of those books got published and one day I found myself at Northwest Bookfest at a table for local authors when who should stop by but Beth C. Beth was also a part of that old high school crowd and I hadn’t seen her in forever.

“Have you heard about Tony?” she asked.

“What happened to him?” I had always liked Tony and I hoped he was all right.

“He’s A. O. Scott.”

“Who’s A. O. Scott?”

“The movie critic for the New York Times.”

“Oh.”

I can’t say I wasn’t impressed, and I think I would have been more envious of his fancy job if life at that moment did not seem so utterly on purpose.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Lay Down Your Swords

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

I have written a number of times in this space about certain teachers and mentor-types who, during my formative high school days, told me in one way or another, “You are not a good writer and you do not understand what good writing is.” The message seemed clear: do something else. These remarks came often enough, by which I mean about once a year, that I felt as if there was a spot on my ego like a toe that had been banged so often it was never allowed to heal.

Despite the criticism, I left high school as determined as ever to be a writer. My first semester in college I was required to take Composition 101. I liked the professor very much. He was funny, cheery, articulate, learned, and had none of the crushing disenchantment to which small town inner city high school teachers are susceptible.

One of our first assignments was to write a “descriptive essay.” By way of explanation the professor produced some yellowed pages and proceeded to read aloud from what he described as the best descriptive essay he had ever received. I have to admit I was editing this piece in my head as I was listening to it, thinking, “That’s a bit overdone.”

On the day the professor was to hand the papers back I came to class dressed all in white. This was how I was back then. He stood in front of the class and said how he had been teaching composition for fifteen years, and in fifteen years he had never received a descriptive piece as good as what he was about to share. He then read my essay aloud, every word of it, pointing out all the many examples “good writing.”

My writer’s ego went into diabetic shock. He was saying everything I had ever wanted a teacher or mentor to say about my work. And this wasn’t some rinky-dink, depressed, high school English teacher; this was a university professor with a pleasant southern accent and a mildly dirty sense of humor. Case closed, yes? Just as in the movies, all the past hurt is wiped clean in one triumphant victory.

Unfortunately, if you live by the sword of opinion, then you die by the sword of opinion. If I am a good writer one day because my professor says I am, then I am a bad writer the next because the college literary editor says I am not. I wish I could remember the exact day I stopped tethering my work’s value to someone else’s opinion as well as I can remember all that praise and criticism, but I cannot. I cannot, because there never was such a moment. I started out not caring, as do we all. That tethering had to be learned, a useless attempt to stave off the perceived loneliness born of asking yourself a question that only you can answer.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com

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You Deserve It

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

Have you noticed when you are talking to someone how aware you are that what you choose to say to that person is a product of who that person is? In other words, if you criticize someone, you are criticizing her, and if you praise someone you are praising her. And so if you criticize someone you might say she deserved the criticism, and if you praise someone you might say she deserved to be praised.

In this way, when you are talking, you are in some way aware that the person to whom you are speaking is responsible not just for what he says but also for what you say, for you have chosen words specifically for him. Each conversation is a unique result of the intersection of two people, a conversation that could not and would not be duplicated precisely by any other two people.

And yet, how often when we are criticized do we say, “I don’t deserve that!” How often when we are criticized do we feel attacked, as if we are victims of some verbal stone hurled our way at random, as if we somehow played no part in what was said to us.

Isn’t it possible that we deserve everything we hear, even the worst and cruelest insults? Isn’t it possible we even deserve to hear someone say, “You are fat, you are stupid, and you are boring?” Why would we deserve to hear this? Because it is the truth, and it is just the jolt we need to finally get to the gym, read the New York Times, and start telling more interesting stories?

Doubtful. But perhaps, in hearing these words spoken aloud and not just in the quiet and claustrophobic confines of our own mind, perhaps actually hearing them we will finally be compelled to say aloud, to say in our own voice what we have been longing to hear: “I am not fat, I am not stupid, and I am not boring.” You would certainly deserve that.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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