i enjoy reading someone's manuscript of unpublished material but i'm unsure why (i'm unsure why i like/do anything). part of it may just be because it's what people do, and i have nothing else to do, and/or am following along with the existing social etiquette. i have had productive DMs and email exchanges with many writers now regarding the above topics. many of these correspondences also involve small talk, personal confession, and discussion of current events (both world news/politics and indie lit drama). i have come to appreciate the way in which social media (maybe just twitter, due to how it's constructed) obfuscates, or easily allows for the obfuscation of, personal information. most writers i see in my little sphere and end up engaging with in some way are, more or less, complete mysteries to me. i do not know what many of them actually look like or sound like, where they live or where they're from, what they do for work, what their education background is like, etc. I have had many preconceptions about writers in this weird small sphere challenged once these conversations begin. for example, i have learned about both "secret MFAs" and "community college dropping out", about which authors people have or have not read, and even personal and/or romantic relationships with other writers vaguely within the same community. i enjoy learning about these kinds of things and seeing the way that it colors my understanding of the community, the people involved, their aspirations, etc., both in terms of general curiosity as well as helping me better understand myself, my aspirations, etc. in general, i feel like more people than i expected have some sort of desire to 'make it' as a writer, e.g. get long-ish literary fiction into prestigious journals, acquire an agent, and publish a book on (an imprint of) a major book press.
i feel like i am more or less open in most of my correspondence and i worry that this comes off as self-centeredness, which is a fear i've harbored since ~4th grade when my dad pulled me aside to tell me that i often talked over my friends (since that experience i have, generally, in person, become more reserved, meek, and dispirited in most casual conversation in person), and so i make, generally, a concerted effort to reflect on what i've said and emphasize asking follow up questions and/or including compliments, etc., in these kinds of conversations with other people. i tend to write lengthy, neurotic emails in a tone that is much different from my tone here in these blog posts, my tweets, and my fiction/poetry. i feel, to some extent, like a failure for so poorly constructing a thoroughly consistent 'persona' across modes of conversation, as compared to other people. i feel worried that this discrepancy in communication style makes communicating with me jarring or frustrating or disappointing. i am often also easily overwhelmed by maintaining personal correspondence, especially via text message. i am currently sitting on a backlog of something like 8 people i need/want to send emails to (and thus several manuscripts i want to give feedback on).
anyway, the point of this post is about reading unpublished manuscripts i've been sent as part of these kinds of correspondences. as a means of being a conscientious, 'reciprocal'-minded conversation partner, i make an effort to ask people i talk to about what they're working on and for them to send it to me. i also 'solicit' manuscripts from people in a non-publishing-oriented way, out of genuine curiosity/interest, if, for example, their website is outdated with broken links, and i'm curious to read more of their writing, or things like that, in situations where we don't otherwise have an ongoing unrelated conversation. i have received 3-4 'manuscripts' that way, and several more from the 'exchange' type of conversation. i'm not sure if i'm making sense. i have a worry, as someone involved with a small press, that these kinds of interactions 'carry some weight' re: publishing, which i dislike, since it usually comes from a general, genuine interest/curiosity and less an active plan on 'scouting manuscripts'. sometimes people don't send me anything, citing its unfinished nature or nonexistence, although sometimes those people eventually send me something a long time later, citing a delay due to various personal reasons. i think, in general, from my personal experience with expectation/hope/etc., that these kinds of manuscript exchanges/solicitations 'result' in something publishing-related, cf. a friend of a friend passing on a demo to a record label executive, and i expect this vague hope is usually mutual, but so far i don't think it has happened, aside from me expressing interest in publishing two books for back patio press. in general, i do not know how someone initiates this kind of exchange with asking someone to read my own work, but it seems to be a thing people do, and do successfully. i have considered reaching out to people to ask them how they initiate these kinds of conversations.
i struggle with giving useful/good/reasonable/acceptable feedback on manuscripts for a few reasons. one is that i have basically no experience with 'workshop etiquette' from e.g. BFA or MFA programs or paid independent workshops, which means that people who have this experience will expect a certain approach to feedback that i am unfamiliar with, which has resulted in me overstepping boundaries or making careless assumptions about a variety of things, resulting in me to some degree hurting the other person and flailing uselessly in apology. related to this is how to separate or communicate personal preference from helpful/useful/objective feedback. for example, i would not feel comfortable trusting my opinion on genre fiction because i do not know what makes genre fiction 'good', and/or i feel some vague sense of disagreement with what makes it good. this applies to 'literary fiction' in a similar sense; i have more or less strong personal convictions (probably misguided and stupid) about literary fiction. i think everyone is the same. i do not know how to give good feedback. i am bumbling through it, generally. i think i have an arbitrary insistence on high standards and am bad at just saying nice things. for example, one time i was talking with a coworker about the pastries from coffee places near where we worked and she tried convincing me that a certain place had really good cheese danishes and i insisted that she was probably wrong. she eventually bought me one to 'convince me' and i maintained that it wasn't very good. relating this story to my wife, she informed me that my coworker was most likely trying to connect with me on a human level and i had been an aloof asshole and that i should have just lied and said it was a very good cheese danish and that we should go to that place for pastries with some frequency, as friends. because of my failures at being a good manuscript exchange partner, i am now overly self-flagellating re: the 'force' with which i suggest or describe anything. i'm trying to think of a word here but can only think of 'demure', which doesn't make any sense and isn't a verb.
as a result my lack of experience/familiarity with providing feedback on writing, i often spend some amount of time dipshitily asking for what kinds of feedback would be useful to the sender, although i rarely get a clear sense of expectations, which isn't anyone's fault, i think, aside from mine. in terms of what kind of feedback that i have found useful for a given story, aside from generic 'praise' which functions as encouragement and copyedits (for typos, etc), i have benefited from hearing interpretations of the 'purpose' of a piece and how the choices in style, tone, etc., affect the execution of that purpose; in general, if someone feels 'confident' in how to interpret a piece of my writing, it feels like a sort of failure on my part, operating from a vague desire to write ambiguously and combat the idea that any given piece of writing must have a discernible 'purpose/moral' aside from evoking an emotion or presenting some kind of unique imagery. i'm not sure what i'm trying to say - usually if an editor, as part of a 'tentative' acceptance for a literary journal, suggests rewriting the ending of my story, i feel like this is evidence that i should not change the ending, based on how i feel about the endings in most stories published by the relevant literary journal. i do feel, however, that feedback on a manuscript as a whole, in terms of sequencing, pacing, size, etc., is very useful and informative, maybe because i tend to have lots of strong opinions about these aspects of a manuscript/book, and so it would feel validating maybe to see other people think of a manuscript in terms of these things.
i'm trying to think of instances in which my feedback was taken into account for a published book. i sent cavin extensive copyedits and some sequencing/cutting/rewriting suggestions for his book I Could be Your Neighbor, Isn't that Horrifying?. the largest impact was recommending that he cut ~3 chapters/stories that developed a sort of subplot that i felt was distracting from my understanding of the purpose of the book. he seems to feel like this was a good idea. i gave some general copyedits for Time. Wow. and suggested that one story be rewritten based on my understanding of a scientific observation which neil had gotten backwards; someone i told this to noted that it was funny to bring up scientific accuracy in a collection of fantastical, calvino-esque interpretations of scientific observations, but it felt important to me for some reason, and neil simply cut the story as opposed to rewriting it. i recommended that tj larkey cut 2 short non-sequiturish chapters from his book Venice, by way of messaging Cavin, who messaged tj, which he agreed to do. i think i gave useful feedback on giacomo's Chainsaw Poems but i can't remember what that would be, i think maybe some suggestions on a couple specific poems as he was writing them and not so much during the compilation of the book. i think i recommended that mike cut or reorder certain poems in an early manuscript which was later reworked into gateway 2000. i have been giving dan some edits/suggestions for watertown from a 'cohesive manuscript' perspective as well. nick farriella claims to have reworked an unpublished collection of his i read a while ago and in retrospect thinks it benefited from things i said, or something to that effect, which felt good to hear.
i also have embarrassing experiences of misunderstanding 'how things work' and not realizing that people charge money for manuscript consultations even though, i think, they don't explicitly advertise that this is something they do for money. in this way i feel stupid for having 'lead someone on' for a sale without realizing it and feel like this kind of interaction has negatively impacted my relationship with people. i don't begrudge anyone who does this but in general i personally feel uncomfortable with paying/charging for manuscript consultation (feels hard to articulate a personal opinion without sounding judgemental of others, cf. being a vegetarian - i think it's ok to charge/pay for manuscript consultation if it's important/useful/good for you).
Not sure if I'm more afraid of being lumped in with your conception of "genre" or "literary," but also wanna shoot your own line back atcha: "it's enough to know you read it. it's in your brain now and no one can take that away"
ReplyDeletei was honestly surprised when you sent me a 600k word young adult high fantasy adaptation of the prince of persia franchise
Delete