Preemptive Retaliation

I have a draft here where I bemoan the feedback I received for a not-so-good short story I submitted a while back. The person sending the feedback didn’t understand the story properly, they didn’t get it, in fact the whole point of the story went a way way over their heads, and instead they focussed on the minutia. I was annoyed at this, especially since I re-read the story immediately after seeing the feedback, and I really like it! There are so many stories I right that I feel are full of heart but don’t quite hit what I’m going for – but not this one! I really like it!

But then I stretched that blog post over a few days and, honestly, I lost all steam with it. I had some good points to make – how what I think about a story might not be the truth, death of the author and all that, and a very apt quote from Lucky Number Slevin which I’ll post here;

“The first time someone calls you a horse you punch him on the nose, the second time someone calls you a horse you call him a jerk but the third time someone calls you a horse, well then perhaps it’s time to go shopping for a saddle.”

In the end, the person giving the feedback was right – and it doesn’t matter if they had five pieces to read that week or five hundred, in the circumstance in which they read my story, they were right.

Currently I’m reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and right before I started I happened upon a Reddit post talking about it. The post was going into theories into the nature of the novel, going into metaphors and comparisons – and I bookmarked it specifically to come back to later, after I had read the whole thing. It’d be interesting to see how my thoughts compare.

But now that I’m reading it, I find that Reddit post is creeping in on my interpretation of the book. I’m forming theories and ideas on what it’s about, but what little I read of the post is poking at me, asking me to consider it, that it is definitely a smarter interpretation than what I am able to conjure on my own. And it’s annoying. I’m reading the book. It shouldn’t be up to anyone else to tell me what I feel about it, what I take away from it, what mystery I find the most intriguing to unravel.

So the person giving feedback was right. My voice was strange and off-putting. The themes that I wrote with in mind were not apparent. There is a dynamic that isn’t explored. Maybe that wasn’t the story I wanted to write, but that’s ok. I just have to go back now and write it better.

But, at the end, the final line of feedback and, mostly, the only bit of praise, was this;

It is a good story and deserves further work.

And I’m going to ride that high for the rest of the week.