The Crusher of Dreams

And Explicit Instructions to Ward It Off

The other day I heard the most infuriating thing. Actually I’ve heard a lot of infuriating things lately, I have a recent-onset anger issue. I was exposed to gamma radiation. I am the Hulk.

The thing I’m specifically referencing is the case of a woman who has completed a manuscript and hired an editor to review it. Among the editor’s comments was the feedback, “there’s no audience for this.” The writer was, understandably, heartbroken. Writing a whole manuscript and then finding out there’s “no audience” for it will do that to you. Her dream was to publish a book and she felt the feedback she received indicated that she would never make it a reality: Dream crushed.

There’s good news for her, though, which is: That editor is incorrect. I have not read the manuscript in question, but I’m confident the editor is wrong. The simple question I had for that writer was: Do you enjoy reading your manuscript? When you step away from it for a while and then come back and read it, does it entertain you? Because no man is an island. Except for Krakoa in the X-Men comics, that’s a man who is an island. Which goes to show there’s an exception to any rule. 

I don’t believe there’s anything on this Earth that can entertain one person and only one person and no other people under any circumstances will ever be entertained by it. I even enjoy looking at other people’s vacation photos sometimes: This is the truth. My friend Gail went to Iceland and I looked at every single one of her photos and I genuinely enjoyed the experience of looking at them. I know it’s a trope that being made to look at other people’s vacation photos is some kind of torture but that’s not universally true.

What are the chances this writer has written the exception to the rule, the one manuscript on the planet by which no one will ever be entertained? Answer: Zero chance; that manuscript exists and it is Finnegans Wake.

Anyway, if this writer has written a manuscript that she enjoys reading, then someone else out there is going to also enjoy reading it. This is irrespective of manuscript “quality” in any of its possible senses. There are readers out there who read anything in their niche genre and do not care about stuff like typos, grammatical errors, and usage. There are readers who don’t mind at all if four side characters are all named Maggie. There readers who don’t give a single fig about a three-act structure or a dramatic question or plot holes as long as the story has the things they like.

There is always an audience. This is a neat thing the internet has shown us. There are more people out there exactly like us than we knew. That weird thing you used to do as a kid? There are 50,000 people on Twitter right now talking about how they used to do the exact same thing. That obscure TV show from the 1980s that you saw two episodes of and you loved it but nobody you’ve ever spoken to remembers it? Somewhere on the internet there’s a fandom for it putting out fanfiction and fanart as we speak.

The question is not whether your writing has “an audience.” The question, rather, is what your expectation is for the audience your writing will find. Everything has an audience but sometimes that audience is 1,000 guys scattered across the globe and sometimes it’s 80 percent of the world’s English-speaking population.

I got right to it today without any preamble but I suppose what’s on my mind is the concept of audience for media. It’s not all-or-nothing. It’s not “you trad publish a bestseller to critical acclaim and a three-movie deal” or “abject failure.” Writing and publishing success—success in anything, I think—is a spectrum and not a yes-or-no, you-achieved-it-or-you-didn’t proposition.

I said “writing and publishing” success instead of just publishing success because just writing something complete is a triumph. Every few years in my twenties and thirties I’d decide to take up jogging and I’d start out half-walking half-jogging through five kilometers and finish feeling like death and then someone from my life would materialize—in person or virtually—to remind me “you’re lapping everybody who’s still on the couch!” I’m older and wiser now and I have chosen the way of the couch but the same goes for writing a manuscript: If you complete a manuscript, you already lapped everybody who’s still just talking about writing a manuscript. (As an editor I have firsthand information about who-all is thinking about writing a novel or memoir—because when people hear you’re an editor they automatically tell you their writing aspirations—and, for your information, it’s everyone.)

Let’s assume if you’re at this stage you’ve written your manuscript. Maybe it’s revised to the point you’re completely done working on it and ready to send it on to its next phase, maybe you’re open to revising, maybe you’re elbows-deep in revisions. Whatever.

Somewhere in your mind you have a vision for the next phase of your manuscript’s life. Some part of you has hopes and expectations for what will happen to your manuscript now (or when you’ve finished revising it to the best of your ability). Your expectation for that manuscript falls somewhere on the broad spectrum of “publishing success.” Your expectation might be, “I will send this to an agent, and they’ll sign it and sell it to a publisher, and I will be able to walk into a bookstore and find my book on the shelf and flip it over to see my author photo stare back at me.” Your expectation might be, “I will upload this to KDP and release it for publication and I will officially have a published book to my name.” Your expectation might be anywhere in between or you might have a narrow or broad range of expectations (eg, “it would be nice if this sold to a publisher but if it doesn’t I’ll self-publish it”).

The dream-crushing aspect comes in when writers believe that any outcome for their manuscript that does not match or exceed their expectation for it is a failure. Dream-crushing is encouraged by the dissonance created when our deeply held beliefs about our manuscript don’t stand up to real-world wear and tear. We believe we’ve got something good in hand and then we share it with somebody and their assessment of the work does not match our assessment of the work. That creates dissonance in our understanding of our own work product. This dissonance does not crush your dream; it merely encourages you to crush your dream. Only you have the power to crush your own dreams. Nobody else can do that for you.

In my life I have encountered a number of people who have given up on publishing a book or story. Most give up before they start writing and many more give up before they finish writing. The next biggest group of people who give up do so before they attempt to publish. These folks have written something and give up on publishing it before sharing it with an agent or publisher or before self-publishing. The fear of rejection or receiving negative feedback is their obstacle. The next group of giver-uppers, naturally, are those who give up after the first rejection. Giving up on publishing something is what crushes the dream to publish that something. Not the rejection or the fear of rejection.

Getting through the dissonance is the trick. If you experience dissonance because an external assessment of your work does not align with your internal assessment of your work you have two options:

1. Adjust your internal assessment.

2. Reject the external assessment.

Either of those things will resolve the disharmony. If your internal assessment was “this is perfect” and the external feedback came back “this is not perfect,” you either accept that your manuscript is not perfect or you reject feedback that your manuscript is not perfect. That’s a very black-and-white example with an easy solution because everyone reading know there’s no such thing as a perfect manuscript. In this example, the external feedback is objectively correct and the internal assessment is objectively wrong. Most of the time the resolution will not be so cut-and-dried. The writer has to sit down with the feedback they’ve received and evaluate it as neutrally as possible and leaving their ego outside the process as much as possible. 

Not all external feedback is created equal. Part of being a writer is learning to evaluate feedback and figure out what’s going to help your work and what’s not. The easy shortcut is either accepting or rejecting all the feedback you get without discrimination. Almost any body of feedback will contain some proportion of useful information to not-useful information.

And not all internal assessment is correct; in my experience, my own ability to assess my writing has gotten better with time—a lot of time—but it’s still not dead-on. Sometimes I get great feedback on stuff I was personally unimpressed with and sometimes I get more constructive criticism than I expected on stuff I thought was my best work. I suspect writers who receive and process more feedback get better at evaluating their own writing with time, but in this case I can only speak my own experience and my suspicion. I can’t get in anybody else’s head. But I think the newer you are at evaluating and learning from feedback on your writing, the less likely you are to hold an accurate internal assessment of your writing.

As a rule of thumb, if you think your writing is so good that it cannot be improved, then your internal assessment is surely wrong. And if you think your writing is so terrible that it cannot be improved, then your internal assessment is surely wrong.

Whenever I get feedback on anything, I read the feedback then walk away from it for a while during which time I comfort myself that it’s all obviously wrong and the person providing the feedback didn’t know what they were talking about (unless the feedback was overwhelmingly positive in which case the feedback provider is a genius and obviously correct). After I let the natural defensive reaction to criticism have a few minutes or hours or whatever, then I sit down and get to the real work. 

Every writer would like to receive feedback that confirms their belief that their writing is impeccable and cannot improve in any way. Receiving feedback that your writing can be improved in some way may not be the outcome you were hoping for when you requested feedback, but that doesn’t mean your writing failed. Likewise, every writer would like their writing to be discovered in situ and appreciated by someone with the power to make them wealthy and famous—everyone writer wants to toss their manuscript into a ring of agents and ignite a bidding war. If that doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean your submission failed.

There are two things you can change:

1. Your understanding of what success will look like for your project (you adjust this through reflection)

2. The quality of your project (you adjust this through revision, editing, and implementing feedback)

I really believe every manuscript can reach a successful outcome through a combination of these two factors. If the manuscript you have in your hand right now isn’t able to achieve the expectation for success you have in mind for it right now you can revise the manuscript to some extent and you can adjust your expectations to some extent. There’s always somewhere in the middle these two things can meet.

Finally: If you’re feeling really crummy about your dream (whether it’s writing or something else) due to setbacks or dissonance or something else, put your dream in a cupboard for a while and come back to it later when you feel better. They don’t go bad. 

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