Outgrowing the critics

I’m reading Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices this week.  It’s a chunky book full of essays and talks stretching from 1997 to 2014, and already I’ve found several profound ideas in the first few essays.

One phrase that leapt out at me comes from the very first piece in the book, titled Magic Carpets.  In it, Pullman talks about the various types of responsibility placed on the author.  “I have to keep the story’s counsel,” he says “there are secrets between us, and it would be the grossest breach of confidence to give them away.”

He’s talking there about people critiquing your story at a very early stage.  He says later, in the essay The Writing of Stories, that “sometimes you have to take a firm line with the critics.” In the commentary at the end of that piece he says “it’s also a fact that a book is s solitary enterprise,  We don’t have to talk about it before it’s finished, and in fact it’s better not to.”

I found that rather reassuring. At the beginning of our careers as writers we do need to learn our craft, and that might well involve attending taught courses and workshops and putting our work out there for feedback.  But, as I said in last week’s blog, workshopping your manuscripts comes with risk.  You might get people who give you useless feedback.  That’s easy enough to ignore.  You know it can’t help you to improve your work, so you easily discount it.

But the danger comes when experienced writers give you feedback on a piece that sounds useful, but which you intuitively know is not for you.  This can simply be as a result of the person critiquing your work not ‘getting’ it, but it can also be driven by darker motives,  If the critique is motivated by jealousy of your writing, or the critiquer’s dislike of your subject matter, you can end up receiving feedback that is very harmful to you and your work.

So, after thirty years of attending writing courses, literary festivals and critique groups, I’ve got to the point Philip Pullman takes.  I’m not going to run my work past anyone other than my trusted close writer friends’ critique group, or past my local writers’ circle.  These are all writers I've known for many years.  I know their capabilities, interests and agendas, and I know which parts of their feedback I can trust.

Other than that, I’m stepping back from critique groups.  I’ve learned to trust my instincts.  I’m sure when I eventually secure an agent and sell my work I will need to change things, but that feedback will come from professionals, and will be focussed on making the work more marketable.  And these days, that’s the only type of feedback I need.