A Reflection on the Boston Book Festival: Taming That Self-Criticism

 

By Julie Wu

I had a fabulous time at the Boston Book Festival this weekend.  I was with three other authors on a historical fiction panel and by chance met two of the other panelists beforehand at the author party.  They were lovely.  As debut authors often do, we commiserated about tours and sales and the difficulties of writing book two.  And when our panel came to pass, the hall overflowed, literally, into the lobby, we had a great conversation, and the audience laughed at all my jokes.

But when I walked away, I thought, whoops, I missed the boat there.  I had taken the summer off from promotion and forgotten how to promote my book.  Instead of laughing and having a good time, I should have been hitting a list of essential items to pique interest in my book.  Instead of talking about how I started the book in 1989 and danced around it for decades, I should have proclaimed that The Third Son is the first American novel to cover the previously censored modern history of Taiwan.  I should have waxed eloquent about the parallels between the trajectory of the country’s history and the novel’s central story.  If I had, every single member of that huge audience would have lined up and bought my book, making it a Boston Globe—nay, a New York Times bestseller.  Instead, because of my laxity, my book and I were heading for the remainder bin and eternal obscurity.

Self-critical much?  Well, of course.  If I weren’t, I would not have ever started writing at all.  The source of all my characters is my own observation, self-examination, and self-recrimination.  My ear for dialogue has been honed by a lifetime of mulling over conversations I wished I had conducted otherwise, or that I wish I had conducted, or not conducted, at all.

That said, when I first started writing my book, decades ago, I was happily naive and thought it was terrific.  Don’t we all, at the start?  Why else would we persist and send our work into the world?  But, as with any endeavor I have ever undertaken, the more I learned, the more I realized I needed to learn.  A large part of my journey as a writer has been learning to judge which parts of my work can be improved, and which are awful and should be deleted without a second thought.

The process of publishing my book has been one of increasingly pointed criticism—the agent chose the book because she loved it, but thought it needed some shaping.  I agreed, and took my revisions several steps further than she suggested.  The editor loved the story, but suggested changing some scenes.  Again, I enthusiastically revised more than what was asked.  The copyeditor took issue with a couple of my dates and my Taiwanese transliteration.  Fine, I took it all.  I was happy to hear any criticism, because it gave me an opportunity to make my book the best it could be.

The tricky part, I’m coming to realize, is now, when the book is done, published, printed, unchangeable.  My self criticism, innate, eager, and now finely honed, is now on the loose.  And it no longer has a manuscript to polish.  Instead, it has other things to focus on—my public speaking style, my self promotional skills, my ability to get my book noticed, and my first draft of book two.  And there’s a problem with all of that:  My book sales, unlike my manuscript, are not under my control.  There is no proof that if I hit certain notes in my speech or tour in a certain town that my book will sell through the roof.  No one knows if any of the self promotion we’re all told to do really helps at all.

And most importantly, my nascent inklings of book two cannot bear all that criticism.  To persist with this book, I do need to think it is terrific.  It is just too paralyzing to think while I write that I will be throwing out ninety-eight percent of what I am producing.  I need to recapture that excitement of thinking that what I’m writing matters, that it will make people both cry and rise up in arms, that it’s worth the time and effort for me to write it and for others to read it.

And so I am going to try, very, very hard, to take a step back.  I’m going to try my best to shut down that self critical voice, the one that makes me feel inadequate as both a book promoter and a sophomore novelist.  It’s time to recapture some of that naïveté of years past, enjoy myself, and get back to work.