Hey Everyone!
As those of you who follow my blog know, I recently published a new book. While I was working on the final polish before publishing, I read back through the dialogue to make sure each character's "voice" was distinct and unique to them. I think any author can identify with the struggle to "get into the heads" of characters; to make sure that everything they say and do in the story is consistent with who they are. The process reminded me of something I thought of several years ago when I received my first one-star review.
The review was on my first novel, and it's certainly not the only bad review I've received, but it was the first. Normally, I don't think too much about bad reviews, and I pretty much never comment on them, but this one stuck with me. And it wasn't just because it was my first or because it was critical.
As I said, it was my first novel, and that fact showed. I've already gone back and revised it once and probably will again, at some point. My writing has gotten cleaner with each successive book; it seems I learn something important during the creation process every time. And, amazingly enough, practice does seem to hone one's skill, even in writing. Who knew?
So some of the criticism was warranted. But there were two things that stuck with me about the review. One was simply a statement of fact, though why the reader considered that fact worthy of censure is something that escapes me. They declared that my book is "unrealistic." Well, considering it's a paranormal romance set mainly in Fairie, I would have thought that would be obvious. Why someone would choose a fantasy genre if they're looking for realism is a mystery to me. But, fair enough, they were correct. It is unrealistic.
But the other statement is the one that bugged me the most. Because even in that early example of my work, I strove to make sure my characters' thoughts, words, and actions were consistent with who they were. There's a point in the story when the heroine, after she has been taken to Fairie, observes one of the Fae making bread. And she thinks to herself about how she had never thought about what went into making bread because, in her experience, bread came in plastic bags at the grocery store. And the reviewer took issue with this scene, asserting that everyone knows how to make bread.
The heroine in that story was a woman in her late twenties who was orphaned as a baby. She was subsequently bounced from foster home to foster home until she aged out of the system and started working at a myriad of low-paying, dead-end jobs, always two or three at a time. As a child, she never had adults in her life who took an interest in teaching her to cook, and she never had time to teach herself as an adult. To her, food came in tin cans or cardboard boxes and was heated in a microwave. Which is a reality lived by many.
It took a while to figure out why this simple critique bothered me so much. I've received much harsher criticism that barely registered, so it was odd to me that this is what stuck in my mind. But I finally realized it was the obliviousness to the way others experience the world that was reflected in the assumption that, of course, everyone knows how to make bread was what was getting under my skin.
It wasn't just a book review, any more than the legend about Marie Antoinette advising the people to eat cake was just a menu suggestion. It was a reflection of a worldview that fails to take into account the challenges and obstacles that others have to overcome just to get where some of us are fortunate enough to start. A paradigm that centers around a lack of empathy.
Yes, I realize I'm reading too much into a single statement. Not being able to identify with a specific character doesn't say much about a person. Especially when the argument can certainly be made that it was my failure to craft a character who was real enough to be relatable that was the actual cause of the problem.
But regardless of whether it was true of the reviewer, it's certainly true of our society in general that there is often a lack of understanding for perspectives that don't match our own. Worse, there's a lack of willingness to even try to understand. Granted, it's not easy. One of the biggest challenges in writing is trying to see the world through the eyes of different characters.
But in life, as in writing, it's necessary to meet that challenge. If we don't, then our stories can only be two dimensional and boring, with none of the spice and variety that can only come from an appreciation for the breadth and depth of the span that makes up the human experience. And the way every individual's slice of that experience colors their behavior, including our own.
Peace!
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