You Just Haven't Earned it Yet Baby
Recently, I have been paying someone to give me a good kick in the ass. (No, not that kind of kick in the butt. I’m talking about the honest in-your-face critique of my work).
When I first started working with this person, I was terrified. I’d spent three years working on a novel and did not want to hear I had wasted those three years, that my story was full of more holes than a colander.
But honestly? When the critique came?
Nothing has ever felt SO good.
Not at the beginning, though.
Let me explain.
Just under a year ago, when I finished a draft of my novel, I was stuck.
I knew the story had good characters, a decent arc, strong setting, and a high stakes story from the past. But the present story? It was, as one of my readers kindly told me, a story about revealing someone’s past. There was no reckoning. What was at stake?
I had to go from writing a story about someone revealing their past—which in fact, had left my readers annoyed because they felt like my protagonist was withholding information just to reveal it— to someone reckoning with their past. I had to create a story in which the protagonist has to not only face his past but decide what it means for him and people he loves; what he’s going to do about the mistakes he made as a young man; and what obstacles he will have to struggle against to find the redemption and reconciliation he desperately wants.
My particular problem is I don’t think in dramatic action. I think in emotional movement. What does the character feel here and then how does that change over here. Backfooting a character arc into a plot is hard, which is why many advice books suggest plotting before you write.
In my studio attic I have a bookstore’s worth of writing books all useful in their own way for revision, but none of them were able to show me how to stand back and look at the whole entire novel. It was like having a counter full of ingredients and a bunch of measuring cups and spoons, but no recipe.
For example, Seven Drafts, by Allison Williams, breaks the novel revising process into seven stages, from the vomit draft (Aka shitty first draft) to the story and character drafts all the way to the line editing draft. Refuse to be Done, by Matt Bell, offers a three draft revision process. KM Weiland has two books on the process that I thought might be helpful: Structuring Your Novel and Outlining Your Novel.
All of these did, in fact, help me get started. I ripped apart my novel and tried to reorganize and rebuild using every available wall and sticky note I could find. I tried various software: Scrivener, Plottr, Aeon Timeline. Piles upon piles of notes were scattered around my house. I even spent weeks with a coach learning how to manage the chaos of having my book completely ripped apart in my head until that didn’t feel so awful.
Months later, I was still going around in circles. I couldn’t see the whole picture or how to build it back out.
So I applied for and got a grant (thank you, Maryland) and hired a well-known story coach.
For the first hour of our first meeting, after reading my first two chapters, said story coach told me everything that was wrong with my opening. She grilled me on what I knew and didn’t know about my characters and the story. Apparently it was a lot.
She told me then to write five backstory scenes that didn’t already appear in the draft. Not notes, not thoughts, not summaries, but boots-on-the-ground scenes in which I was inside the protagonist’s head trying to use what he knew and didn’t know to make decisions. That first meeting was really tough and for a moment after I hung up, I was tempted to give up. The task seemed overwhelming.
But then I told myself—you have one assignment. You are not writing to finish a novel. You have thirty pages to do in two weeks. That’s all. It’s like E.L. Doctorow said about writing a novel: You only need to see as far as your headlights.
So I worked, I sweated, I bit my nails. I stayed with it for two weeks pushing myself as hard as I could. That exercise turned out to be among the hardest writing work I have ever done.
Which is the first lesson I want to share: as writers (and artists) the work we find the hardest is often the work we need to do the most.
I sent my new pages in and what happened?
I got my ass kicked again, harder this time.
“I don’t believe any of these scenes,” she said. “You haven’t earned it.”
What she meant was that my character, when faced with hard choices, was making decisions without my having supplied enough information via interiority or backstory to the reader about how and why he made that choice. Despite the specific assignment she had given me, I had not laid enough groundwork so that my character’s actions matched his interior world and thought process.
In other words, 30 pages of complete failure. Which explains why it was so hard. I was doing something I wasn’t very good at.
Lesson two: when we avoid the work that is hardest for us, we don’t grow as artists.
(I confess: at this moment it was a challenge not to hear Morrissey in my ear:
You just haven't earned it yet, baby
You must suffer and cry for a longer time).
Writing coach sent me on my way with what felt like an even more impossible task: Don’t write anything forward in the present story without writing out the entire backstory of the novel. Not in notes, not in summary, but in scene. And not for the final draft. For me. To have all that information on the page when it was needed.
She then told me she’d be willing to work with me again, but I probably shouldn’t call her for a while. A long while.
I want to be honest and say it took me almost 30 years to get to a place where I could receive criticism like this and not curl up into a fetal ball. For most of my writing life, even the smallest amount of criticism grounded me. And not in a good way—like finding my center—but in the bad way, like an airplane grounded at the gate during an ice storm. No food, no water. Receiving that level of critique for something I had poured my heart into and pored over, would leave me shut into a dark room, wondering why I kept coming back to writing. Why I put myself through this agony. Why I chose this art.
If you’re an artist or writer reading this, you know the answer: We don’t choose it. It chooses us. We don’t really have a say in the matter. And so, all that floor lying and teeth gnashing and fetal curling and falling to pieces— this is partly the legacy of growing up Under the Red Pen. But it’s also life as an artist, and when faced head on, an opportunity for growth. To become more skilled at our work. And to learn how to do the personal growth required to separate ourselves from our art.
Because so many of us put our heart and soul into our art, it’s no wonder that critique can feel so personal. But with that second ass-kicking, I understood something new.
I was not going to get this book into the shape I wanted unless I was willing to put myself through months and months of hard work that was going to feel awful at times. It was going to feel like I was back to square one not just on the story but in my writing skills. Months and months more of internal chaos in my head about what went were and who said what when and which plot point would go where and why did this person do that. Living with the novel in pieces and not knowing if there was going to be any way to put it back together. And on.
Now, almost a year later, and after a lot more sweating and sticky notes and free writing, I am happy to report that after giving myself the time I needed to let her comments sink in, I was just last week able to reconstitute it back into a shape.
Is it a shape that will work? No idea yet.
But I’ve forced myself for months now through a new skill set—learning how to earn my character’s movement and choices.
And surviving—no—thriving, from direct and hard-to-hear criticism.
And a reminder, that even if the book falls apart at some point, none of it is time wasted because that new skill—the writing and the ability to push myself through what is really hard for me— is already moving me forward in other projects.
And finally, hope that despite Morrissey’s doom loop, with lots of hard work, we will all eventually earn it, baby.