I was speaking to a fellow author recently. She has written a fabulous and a very interesting book. It got onto some prestigious prize lists. It was reviewed positively in big publications. I read her book and it stays with me - and it is not too much to say that it has changed me. We strayed into talking about reviews - not just the big reviews in newspapers and literary magazines, but the ones online. It seems that this person's book had received some negative reviews in these online places - one-star reviews that were highly critical and even a little personal. This fellow writer no longer reads reviews of her work - online reviews especially. For her own good mental health, she explained, she avoids confronting them.
When a writer pours themself into a book - maybe over years... hours and weeks and months of hard work sitting alone at a desk, and the heart and soul is emptied onto the page, then a one-star review can be hard to swallow. Can feel like a hard stone thrown or the slash of a sharp knife. I get that. But what about all the great reviews of her book that she is then also missing?
I have said here before how I used to enter short story competitions - sometimes as many as sixty in a year. Some of the stories did extraordinarily well - I say that having been a short story competition judge and knowing how hard it is to think of stories as better or worse than each other, to put them into some sort of order. I recall that when a story of mine won a competition - even a big competition - I was elated and remained elated for maybe three hours; whenever a story did not even reach the longlist, when a story of mine, as they say, bombed, I was devastated for days. I had a 40% hit rate with short story competitions, which is, I am told, very high. I have won dozens of competitions and been on the podium for dozens more. But in reality a 40% hit rate means that 60% of the time I was not doing well - and that's a lot of hard and devastating days.
It goes with the territory. Putting a short story or a book out there, into the world, is always a risk - the risk is that someone will love it to the moon and back, or hate it and want to shit all over it. I can understand this fellow writer not reading any of her reviews - it can be hard.
Today my new book - WOMAN IN BLUE - got its first one-star review... in amongst some pretty wonderful five-star and four-star reviews. Indeed the book, not even released until the end of next month, has predominantly reaped five and four-star reviews and plenty of them, so that this one-star review looks like an outlier. But still!
A writer should not write to be loved. A writer writes because he/she is driven to it. Not just one book but another and another. A writer writes to be read and hopefully for people to find what they have to say interesting or relevant or important. To be read is the thing. And so I am grateful to that one-star reviewer as much as I am to the four-star and fiver-star reviewers - for reading my new book. I thank them for that. I am sorry that they did not like what I wrote and I hope the next book they read gives them what they are looking for.
There. That feels better and feels real and feels like me; and it also makes me feel less devastated. Writers have to learn this lesson, I think.
