A member of what will shortly blossom into the full-fledged Book Writing World–my online community, craft and coaching site for writers of books–had more than a dozen people read her manuscript, writing comments in the margins. Now what? she wondered, looking at this stack of xeroxed books.

First, I told her, open all the manuscripts to page one. Look at anything any one said on page one, and consolidate what is relevant and useful into one book. Go along, page by page, until you’ve reviewed and condensed the whole conversation onto one manuscript.

(On a practical level, this means that you go through each manuscript until you come to the first page that has a comment, and then you let it sit on your bed or floor or wherever you’ve spread everything out, until you get to that page in your review.)

She found it helpful to have this systematic approach, but then she’d finished going through all the pages of all the manuscripts. Now what?

So, what now that you have these comments transcribed?

1) Look through them and make a list of any structural or BIG issue comments that resonate with you but which will need to be addressed on a macro level.
2) These macro issues will take daydreaming, re-plotting, conversations with your character, ripping seams and pulling out nails. Re-visioning. Give them time. Ask yourself questions and let the answers percolate. Draw diagrams, read books, muse.
2) The rest of the comments will be easier: page by page, line by line you look at the comments. If you agree something needs to change, change it.
3) You have to go back to “first draft” writing mode in order to try something out. There’s no way to write something for the first time that isn’t, at some level, a first draft. Sounds obvious, but it’s hard to put first draft material in the middle of a manuscript you’ve been laboring over. There is, however, no other way. You have to experiment, see what works, be willing to get it wrong.
4) Once you think you have something that might work, go on page by page to the next site-specific comment or comments and address those.
5) Keep in constant communication with yourself. Do not fix what does not, to your way of seeing, need fixing. Do not assume that other people’s suggestions will be the right ones to fix a problem. Identify the problem underlying the suggestion and see what your own storyteller has to say about solutions.

I hope this helps others who are wondering how to move forward after a critique! How do you integrate feedback?

Yesterday, I hosted my first free coaching call: Answers and Encouragement for Writers. A handful of my faithful clients and students joined in–but it’s open to everyone, so come by on the third Thursday of next month and get some momentum for your writing life. (June 18, 5 – 6 p.m. PST)

We talked a lot on the call about literary agent and author Donald Maass’s wonderful book Writing the Breakout Novel. I read it a few weeks ago and found it smart, well-written and, most-importantly, craft-oriented.

Nobody knows what sells novels. When my first novel was published, my agent said this to me. She mentioned that being picked by Oprah sells novels, but nothing else guarantees a hot ticket to success.

Donald Maass’s contention is that word of mouth is the number one way to sell books. This makes sense. If you think about it, even Oprah is just a person with a lot of friends who listen to her opinion.

The great good news is that this means that craft–great storytelling, compelling characters, high stakes, meaningful and resonant times and places, profound themes and strong plots, which is to say escalating conflict–is the key to writing the breakout novel.

How many people follow you on Twitter, who you are Facebook friends with, and whether or not your cousin works for Oprah will do nothing for you if you do not have a great book.

But remember, that’s the good news.

The story, the characters, the tale’s vivid world: these make people talk about a book. And craft is the reason we all got into this crazy stew in the first place, right? Other people’s storytelling drew us to the wonder of books, and somewhere along the line we started wanting to brew some of our own magic.

Think about the books you promote. What was the last book you read that you had to recommend to other people, that you couldn’t stop talking about? Post it here if you would be so generous. We talked about our current book passions on the call yesterday, too, and that pulsing feeling of needing to get my hands on a particular new book inspired me, as a reader and as a writer. It reminded me of the sexy pull of great books. Nothing duty-bound about reading them, buying them, and spreading the word.

It’s a good way to think about our own manuscripts, about how to make them deeper, broader, more powerful. How to make them unforgettable, so that people tell their friends, “You have to read this book.”

What’s the last book you said that about?

For a long time, I disdained the people who focused on getting published. When I was in graduate school, great writers came to talk to us and teach us: Denis Johnson, Ethan Canin, Francine Prose, A. M. Holmes, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucille Clifton, to name a few. (Wow, name-dropping is fun!) Inevitably, the questions that came would be peppered with concern about publishing. I always wanted to know about craft and about sustaining the creative part of a writing life, and to be honest with you, I felt pretty good about myself for that attitude.

When FSG published my first novel, this seemed a validation of my focus on craft over career. Because my novel contained lesbian content, and FSG had not published a book with lesbian content before (except, funnily enough, in their YA division, where they’d published Nancy Garden), people at my readings often asked me, over and over, how I’d gotten my book published. I had no answer for them beyond the hard work I’d put into making it strong.

Pretty quickly, though, my naïveté about publishing and marketing caught up with me. I didn’t know that there was a three-month window after a book is published for it to “succeed” or “fail.” I had no idea what I might do to promote the book. In fact, in the months after my book was published, I was packing and moving across the country, leaving behind all the connections I had to local writers and bookstores.

The head agent at my agent’s office met me and told me that the only advice she could give me was to have fun. I understand why she said that–it was Zen good advice. But seriously, folks, if you are a novelist–and this is more true now than it was then–you are a small business owner or you have a hobby. Those are your choices. You might get published once or twice if you have a hobby of writing books, but you cannot sustain a viable career unless you make it your business not only to write books but also to sell them.

(As an aside, I would like to mention that if you are a writer or anyone who cares about textual storytelling, you’d do well to make it your business to buy books, too, and to promote other people’s books and the world of books in general. If you never buy a new, hard cover book, you are going to have a heck of a time believing other people should buy yours.)

It is still a pet peeve of mine when people who have not written one polished, lovely book are hyper focused on selling it. The truth is that while “bad” books are published all the time, the one best marketing tool you can have is an excellent book. That’s why my motto is: If your readers can’t put your book down, they’ll have to buy it. This implies that you’ve written an irresistible story.  You’ve worked on it until it’s powerfully strong.

But my motto also implies that you’ve then gotten your book into the hands of some readers. These are the two parts to our business, and they can feel antithetical to one another.

In the privacy of your office/ bedroom/ café table, you reach into the depths of your mind and scale the rocks and hard places of your soul/ high school experiences/ life, and you come back with a story. The cadences, whether borrowed, stolen or invented, are yours. The sentences and the images and the characters are all yours. Yours the way a baby you birth is yours. And then you have to put the squalling, fragile creature of your heart out into the world, and what’s more, you have to promote it.

Terrifying.

Absurd.

Reprehensible.

But true.

Here’s the good news: I’ve been studying marketing, marketing with integrity and heart, and . . . (drum roll) it can be fun. You want to get your voice out into the world. You have something to offer readers, and you know this because books have been your lifeline, your pleasure and pastime. Right?

So let’s start here, with your commitment to be what Michael Port calls fully self-expressed. And here, there’s more:

I am teaching an exciting new course called Technique. Set goals, write and master the craft.

GIVEAWAY ONE: TONIGHT, I am offering a FREE CLASS BY TELEPHONE. Email me for a space and information about how to call in.

GIVEAWAY TWO: Post a comment on this blog post this week to enter a random drawing to WIN FOUR WEEKS of the Technique Course (value: $150) Winners announced Monday. Please check back and include an email so I can contact you!

FINE PRINT: Class meets by conference call on Wednesdays, 6 – 7:10 p.m. PST. The only charge will be whatever your phone company charges for the call. (You can use a cell if you have free minutes.) If you enroll now to ensure a space or are already enrolled, you will win an extra four weeks after your paid course runs out.

The title of this post is a quote from a conversation with a wonderful coach named Sharon Sayler (check out her radio show), and I think it’s the perfect description of what writing demands of us.

Someone was saying to me this week that it’s not the writing she minds, but the voice in her head that accompanies the writing. The voice that says, “This is not good enough; this is terrible.” That’s what makes writing hard.

I see my kids creating so joyfully. Charlie loves typing at the computer. He’s 18 months old! And we don’t let him watch any television (except inauguration), but we’ve not been able to shield him from our own obsessions with the computer, and he’s hooked. Leo loves to draw. “More drawing,” he says if he has to leave the blank page to, say, eat. And when one page fills, he says, “New page.” With delight.

That voice that critiques the writing as we go is the sum of all that is wrong with the world. It’s a voice that lacks empathy, artistry, depth (other than the depths of despair), compassion, curiosity (what might come of following this line, this trail of words?).

If we heard this voice directed at anyone else–on the political stage or at a restaurant or on television–we would know that we’d sworn enmity to this voice and all it believes in. But in the privacy of our own offices or journals, that voice becomes an ambassador from the land of common sense. It’s Carl Kasell, and you can win him recorded on your answering machine.

The most important thing to remember about the voice that tells you anything at all about the wet new writing you’ve just laid upon the fibers of your page is that that voice is wrong. Plain wrong. That voice doesn’t know. It’s the loudest kid on the bus arguing about whether or not there is a Santa Claus or who is the best softball player. But it doesn’t know the truth; it doesn’t even know how to pause softly and fumble for the truth. It’s a bully. Don’t let yourself be bullied.

You won’t know the worth of the writing until later. Much later. After the draft is finished and some time has been spent recovering yourself and engaging with other things, you will curl up with it and get to know it, this thing that you’ve created. You will have the distance from it so that you can treat it as a friend, not someone you snap at to take the garbage out, not all the shame from the worst moments of your childhood heaped upon the thin thread of your attempted sentence. It will be something else: its own being, separate from you, alive and flawed and wonderful and fixable.

You, at your kitchen table, at your neighborhood cafe, under a blanket on your couch, waiting in the car for your kid to come out of gymnastics. You are working miracles. You are leaping from the trapeze without seeing the net. You are soaring, caught in the currents of air, in the uncertainty that gifts us with new possibilities we could not have imagined otherwise.

Treasure that act. Trust it. Silence the voice. Laugh at it. Shrink it down to size. Write down what it says and put those words in the mouth of your villain. Copy out the opposite of the voice’s evil message and post those words around your house and in your notebooks (computerized or not).

I, and hundreds of thousands like me, are waiting on the other side of a page for that miracle you grind out with so much labor and hesitancy and recklessness and terror and joy. I know a world of people who are not supposed to exist–freaks and queers and manly girls and girly men and all manner of others who are not, anywhere, described or anticipated. If someone is trying to add “readers” to that list, I defy them. We are everywhere, waiting, for the next story that will change our lives.

[Thursday, Feb. 26, I am offering a FREE TELE-CLASS on dialog. Dazzling fun that will grow your writing in ways you won't believe. Email me for information about how to join us.]

I just finished reading two books, in which the authors, very different stylists, both avoided the repetitive usage of the verbs “to be” and “to have” as well as other overdone usages of sentence structure and sentence subjects. They dazzled.

One, Annie Dillard’s triumphant latest novel The Maytrees, lays down line after line, precise, poetic, thick as slabs of homemade, whole grain bread:

Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree’s cap’s shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present’s brine. In those prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man.

Notice, too, no excess articles: ” in cap and knickers.” But “blacked”! Now that’s a verb.

And for contrast, we go to Junot Diaz’s Drown. I’d read a couple of the stories. One I taught in a creative writing course and another a student had brought in to class. But it was not until I adored The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that I plucked my first edition hard-cover (bought back when that was the only edition available) of Drown from the shelf and devoured it. I think I’d convinced myself that the hype probably had it wrong; instead, I was wrong about the hype.

Check it out, looking again at the mastery of verbs:

He’s tired and aching but he looks out over the valley, and the way the land curves away to hide itself reminds him of the way Lou hides his dominoes when they play. Go, she says. Before your father comes out.
He knows what happens when his father comes out. He pulls on his mask and feels the fleas stirring in the cloth. When she turns her back, he hides, blending into the weeks. He watches his mother hold Pesao’s head gently under the faucet and when the water finally urges out from the pipe Pesao yells as if he’s been given a present or a wish come true.

“Urges” is not a typo; it’s Diaz’s twist.

None of these sentences eats its own tail, crushing meaning, curling in on itself. Neither do they plod, predicting each other. I’ve not picked the best passages or any in particular. I’ve merely leafed through, finding something to put down for you as representative of the whole.

I’ve just finished a pass through the novel I wrote at the end of 2007, starting in NaNoWriMo. The pleasure of editing is that it bolsters the writer, assured that these sentences can be revisited and strengthened. She can

replace “to be” and “to have” with better verbs,

flip the subject of the sentence,

cut excess articles,

move adverbs into verbs and adjectives into nouns by choosing stronger words.

Metaphors can be brought through a sentence, so that the verb alludes to the metaphor, too.

Cliché’s can be tweaked or excised.

Slogging through close editing reminds me that the first draft just needs to get on the page; it’s easier to fix it than to get it right in the first place, at least for me. I get, at the bone, that writing is rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting.

The good news about the ninety-nine percent perspiration–the secret news–is that the hard work pleasures the mind and the body, which want to pump, push and ache. The doubts and misery about the one percent inspiration melt in the face of the methodical effort that can turn out a perfectly juicy sentence.

This week, my revision course begins with Reading as a Stranger. I just posted the lecture and am reminded that anyone with a legitimate call to writing starts out (and continues on) as a reader first. Getting to be an ace reader of your own work rewards the inner reader that put you in the middle of this writing mess in the first place.

Oh–and I am going to get my monthly “writing tips” newsletter out this week, though there’s been both hell and high water, so if you want to get that in your email box (not more than once a month), sign up in the right side margin.

And if you have nothing to revise? Get something down. The worse it is, the easier it will be to make it better later . . .

At the start of last November, I had a two-month-old baby and a six-month-old baby. Years before I’d published a novel, and for the years since, I had been revising and revising my second novel, Strip. Sure, I had written some short stories, published some articles, made a couple of films, even. I’d gotten and given up a tenure-track teaching job, and taught elsewhere and privately, too. I’d moved across the country a couple of times since my first novel was published. In other words, I kept busy, which is sometimes the same thing as productive and sometimes not.

But I was not really a writer. “A real writer is someone who really writes,” Marge Piercy says in her rather profound poem “For the Young Who Want To.”

This is not to say that someone else had penned my novels–the published one or the endlessly revised one–or articles or any of that. It was just that, despite knowing better, I had a sort of passionate, on-again, off-again relationship with the kind of Writing that hangs out in clubs with people who call themselves “Inspiration” and “Great Idea” and “Excitement.” They have little gang rumbles with people who call themselves “Doubt” and “Brilliant Editor” and “You Could Do Better.”

Having babies got me really focused. I couldn’t hang out with that kind of writing anymore, had no time for skirmishes or romances or other capital-D Distractions. But did I have time to write?

That’s when NaNoWriMo came along. It sounds goofy, amaturish, like a crutch or a scam or some kind of edifice with nothing behind it, perhaps. But what, you may be asking, is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo, Friends, is National Novel Writing Month. A web site; a sort of a program; a contest in which the number of winners is unlimited. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.com . . .

So there I was with the two babies, and after they would fall asleep, around 7 or 8 p.m., I would sit down, half-asleep myself, and type out about 2,000 words. (Officially, you must write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30 to “win.” This works out to 1667 words/ day, but I started a day or two late, so I aimed for 2000 words. Also, I knew that I would be cutting so much of what I wrote, that I felt I had to get over 80,000 before I stopped.)

I crossed the 50,000 word line at the end of November, and then I kept on going, at a slightly less hectic pace, but more or less the same, until about Xmas, when I got to about 85,000 words and the end of a draft.

Those are the logistics. Also included are writing buddies, all sort of cafe events and marathons across the country (none of which I participated in because of the aforementioned babies), pep talks sent out by NaNoWriMo from various authors, and forums where you can get advice, solicit plot suggestions, commiserate, or just waste time.

Oh, and there are a number of people who’ve published their NaNoWriMo books (after, one assumes, significant revision), including Curve editor Diane Anderson-Minshall and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall, as well as Sara Gruen, whose Water for Elephants was a NaNoWriMo book, as was a previous book of hers. (There’s a list at the web site of other published authors; these were the ones I’d heard of . . .)

But more importantly than all of that, for me, is the personal experience I had of sitting down, night after night, exhausted and uninspired much of the time, leaking breast milk, to pound away at the keyboard. Sometimes I was nearly asleep, leaning close to the screen of my trusty laptop, letting my unconscious take over. My unconscious did all right.

Sure, the book is full of extra information, a lot of “ideas” and digressions, and even an excess of description. But I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to writing fiction. This comes from a certain fear, I think, something M.F.A.-driven that has to do with “purple prose” and a tendency toward embellishment and nostalgia. In other words, I have been developing a style that is in many ways opposite to my own “natural” style–a reaction to the “faults” that others have pointed out to me.

Fitzgerald said something about keeping all the quirks that the critics hated because that was his original style. I can’t find the quote right now, even at Google, but my larger point is that writing a first draft full of my inherent stylistic choices taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

Honestly, while I was doing this–churning out 2000 words every night–I felt confident that I would continue doing this every day for the rest of my life. I felt a kinship to Joyce Carol Oates that I’d never felt before. Because if only half of what I wrote was worthwhile, I could still write several decent novels a year at this rate, and raise up a passel of babies, too.

I forgot that babies stop sleeping so much and start running around and talking, at which point they need to be chased and answered, and it’s just harder to mull over the coming night’s writing while chasing and talking than it is while humming, rocking and nursing. I also forgot that good habits are hard-earned. Which is to say that I have not continued to write 2000 words every day, or even 1000 (though since I began blogging, I’ve written some number every other day or so).

However: November approaches.

Here’s what happens when I put my seat in the seat and type. Characters do things I hadn’t imagined; scenes develop; histories unfold; the people talk to each other and I listen, carefully, sleepily, and take notes. I know more and have more to say in front of a keyboard than I ever do anywhere else. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” My partner, Angie, talks about writing in that way–to find out what happens. When you write everyday, no matter what, you get as close as possible to being a reader of your own work, with the attendant pleasures, surprises and identifications readers get to experience.

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates once on the radio (with either Terri Gross or Michael Krazny, can’t remember), in which she talked about how she goes jogging every day, and while she jogs, she tells herself stories, so that when she goes to the keyboard, all she has to do is write from recall. Let us not forget that she lives in New Jersey, a place of winter, of snow. So this takes some dedication to the running, not to mention the writing.

In any case, for that month, I was more of a writer than I’d ever been, despite the above mentioned published novel, the unpublished novel, the M.F.A., and the teaching. Which is to say: I was writing. And when you are writing you don’t much care if you are a writer, just as when you are making love, you don’t much care if you are a lover. You’re just doing it, and it’s great.

So I invite you to join me over at the NaNoWriMo site. Become my “buddy,” so we can encourage each other along. I know you are busy and perhaps frightened and maybe you have a dissertation due or a job that drains you or babies to tend, but really, is that any excuse not to write a novel in November?

[Note: Fifteen percent of the 100,000 people who participated in NaNoWriMo last year completed their 50k words. Check out the course I am offering to see you through before, during and after: http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses. Thanks.]

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of board books. You know, the square-ish kind with thick, cardboard pages. Goodnight, Moon and Bert’s Bedtime Story and Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I read them aloud, of course, and Leo and Charlie take turns (more or less) turning the pages. Very often, they turn two or three or five pages at once–sometimes on purpose, when the pace of the story needs some pick-up, and often by accident, when enthusiasm to see what happens next overcomes finger dexterity. In those latter instances, we find ourselves suddenly on the wrong page, a step ahead of where the story should be. We pause. I say, “We skipped a page!” and back we go to rescue the overlooked piece of the rhyme or plot turn.

I have such a strong memory of this phenomenon: skipping a page. The visceral feeling of suddenly landing where you did not expect to land. You see, we readers are participant storytellers. We understand the build of a story as well as any writer; the story operates in concert with our expectations–meeting them, surprising them convincingly, or surprising them wrongly, terribly wrongly–as when a page is simply skipped.

So strong is my memory of this, that I came back to it at this juncture in my life without realizing that it really doesn’t happen to me anymore in my own reading. I had to stop and think about this; I no longer accidentally skip a page–or very rarely. Well, come to think of it, I suppose there have been those moments when the line of text on the following page did not sensically flow from the preceeding page. So it does happen as an adult, but not five, six times a day. And yet I know exactly what has happened, as if I myself were one or two or three just yesterday and not some decades back.

There are other things like this, stuff we learn to navigate, only to outgrow: Stepping on the heel of our own shoe. Falling over onto flat palms. (Remember the sting?) The heaviness of jeans logged with wet sand. Bringing a piece of cheese up to your mouth and popping it in, only to discover that the cheese has tumbled away and you are popping in nothing. (“Goodnight Nobody.”) The pleasure of being able to accurately identify your own nose and head and ears and belly. And how LONG an hour can be, filled with so many different books and games and activities and maybe a snack, too.

This is what writing gives back to you, and children, too: attention to detail, delight in detail, and yes, sometimes, frustration with detail. A genuine love affair with the minutiae that, in the end, may be all there really is, though we shift our investments to theories and overviews and goals, to large organizing principles that claim to move and sort the details.

Story makes that claim, too, I suppose. I am in the process of mapping a book I wrote–first draft–in seven weeks. Now I am imposing order, logic, a train of motion. But I think it’s important to remember the surprise of skipping a page, the close-up view of the sidewalk when suddenly you’re horizontal and your hands sting, the world of the story that is made up of invisible pieces of cheese that leave your mouth empty and wondering.

In raising two lovely little boys, I have been thinking a lot about praise. People and books offer all sorts of advice about how to raise children, and one suggestion is that parents praise effort and persistence, rather than simply the child’s existence. Obviously, the idea is that if you reward the push, you’ll get a child (and then a grown-up) who keeps trying, who doesn’t give up. These qualities are required for success or even just for hobbling along in the world, so why not nurture them?

I was at a dinner party last night, and someone talked about praising children so that they would grow-up feeling good about themselves. I pointed out that “self-esteem” acquired from being told you are great is hollow if effort and persistence haven’t been encouraged. Someone else pointed out that praising kids for “trying” sometimes leaves us with people who feel good about making an effort even if they don’t actually achieve anything or gain the necessary skills to accomplish whatever they are trying to do.

As a parent, abandoning formulas which can never be proven anyway, I find myself praising all of it: effort that leads to failure, effort that leads to success, and just the downright praisability of their very beings.

In editing writers, people often forget the importance of praise. Here I do not mean empty or false praise. I mean praise, lodged in the middle of a rigorous critique, that acknowledges what is working (and perhaps why). Writers need to learn what we do right as much or more than we need to learn what we do wrong. Writers need to be guided by the light of their own visions along the paths they are attempting to hack through the jungle, rather than be pointed toward some far distant light or hounded off the path with complaints. A smart reader brings out a smart writer.

Self-praise

I can give you the harshest critique of “The Secret” and other like-minded new ageiness that makes all of us the authors of our own destinies. This logic can be cruel in many instances, and unhelpful. But in those moments of those lives that have a heck of a lot of leeway and privilege–like mine, knock wood, most days–a little dose of optimism surely goes a long way.

I’ll tell you a secret.

A writer friend of mine, Katia Noyes–hostess of the wonderful dinner party last night and author of an amazing novel called Crashing America–has been helping me structure my revisions of my third novel. First, I went through the whole thing (which I wrote in seven crazy, sleep-deprived weeks with two babies under eight-months old) and created a fifteen-page, detailed outline, a list really, of the book. Each day I had to go through a minimum of ten pages, and then report to Katia by email. In the email, I also had to include an affirmation to the effect that this novel does not have to be perfect, and that I know what the book needs and what I want.

There is a lot the affirmations cannot fix. But none of this–my hesitancy, my fear based on past experience and fatigue, my self-doubt–is one of those things.

I was supposed to post affirmations all over the house before giving birth, and you know, we never got around to it. Instead, Angie voiced them all to me throughout my labor, and that worked fine. I am not a devotee of affirmations. Or I didn’t used to be. But this daily reporting to Katia got me going. It shifted the way I felt about the project and its writer.

There’s that old story of Niels Bohr, the physicist. He had a horseshoe hanging over his office door, and a colleague said, “Niels, why do have a horseshoe there?” Niels said, “They say it brings good luck.” “Surely,” the colleague replied, “you don’t believe in that.” “No,” Niels said, “but they say that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

So, too, with affirmations. Try it. Not for curing cancer, you know? But for changing attitudes: at least your own.

What do you affirm?

A long time ago, a friend of mine was getting married in an empire waist dress with a garland of flowers in her hair. She asked me if I thought her wedding choices were silly. I told her that your wedding is like your bedroom: it only needs to feel right to you (and your spouse). So what about a short story? A memoir? An article? Who do we need to please?

Obviously, we write to communicate–even if we claim only to be communicating with ourselves. I come from a family that kept every scrap of paper I touched with crayon or pencil. As a result, there are ridiculous, inaccessible files crammed with a child’s art. I can safely say that at that age, I was more interested in exploring the media available than in reaching a broad or eternal audience.

My sons help me understand and appreciate conceptual art, because they are conceptual artists. Leo wants to stand in the middle of every manhole or grill in the sidewalk. He wants to stack things. Charlie wants to knock things down. He wants to taste things. Wrapping a bridge in toilet paper would make good sense to them, and so I’ve come to see the worth in exploring just how the world fits together, in ways that don’t line up with the relationships we are painstakingly taught–on Sesame Street or by our parents or in books. Charlie points to an orange and says, “Ball.” Whereas I point to an orange and say, “Fruit. Orange.”

Let’s face it; I am in the business of helping them learn to communicate. If Charlie retains the ability to point to an orange and say, “Ball,” he will be a conceptual artist, no thanks to me. Frankly, all of us–the boys and the moms–are excited when someone says a new word or when someone understands one. We’ve been getting along for over a year now without a lot of help from language, but the boys’ acquisition of English thrills me. Mastery of the collective meanings brings us closer to a communication I cannot help but value. Words are my medium.

Which brings us to critique. I suppose conversation is a kind of critique, perhaps the ideal critique. In a conversation, one person says something, and the other person responds, and the first person may then clarify or amplify or backtrack, and so it goes. (Of course, dialog is famous for showing how, in a conversation, each person may be absolutely on his or her own track, with little regard for what the other person is saying, but that’s another blog . . .)

Writing critiques, which is to say, critiques of fiction or non-fiction or poetry, tend rarely to follow the easy and efficient flow of a conversation. There is a simple reason for this: readers do not know how to respond to a text as readers. Because we gather, as writers, in workshop settings to discuss each other’s work, people have evolved a habit of responding to text as writers rather than as readers. We say, “Why don’t you make the man nicer?” “Why don’t you make the homeless lady and the cab driver into the same person?” “Why don’t you have it rain? Rain would add to the mood.” “And cut that scene in the garden.”

What we need to learn to do is go back to our roles as readers. I don’t know about you, but I am a reader first, before I am a writer. And even as a writer, I function best when I allow the pleasure-loving, image-hungry, story-obsessed person who loses herself in books to set the tone.

Here’s how each of the above questions and comments would translate, if asked by a reader instead of a writer.

“Why don’t you make the man nicer?” becomes “I didn’t like that man. He was so mean. Why did she like him?”

“Why don’t you make the homeless lady and the cab driver into the same person?” becomes “The homeless lady seemed a lot like the cab driver to me, and the second conversation seemed to replay the first. I got a little impatient with him for having the same conversation with everybody.”

“Why don’t you have it rain? Rain would add to the mood.” becomes “I didn’t have a sense of the mood, and I wondered about the weather. What is she noticing in this frame of mind?”

“And cut that scene in the garden.” becomes “I didn’t understand why she stayed in the garden or what happened there that was important to the story.”

What happens for the actual writer of a piece when s/he gets to hear from readers is a marvelous thing. The story opens up as something separate from the writer, something with a life of its own that inhabits the brains and hearts of those most wonderful of beings, readers. And how it feels to read something we’ve written is precisely what the writer cannot know without the help of a workshop.

There is another way to say this: readers do best to identify problems in a work rather than to offer solutions to those problems. There is always more than one solution to any story’s problems. Perhaps the writer does not want the reader to like the mean man; maybe he needs to be mean. But maybe the protagonist’s attraction to him–even to his meanness–is lacking in this version of the story. The writer thus can find his or her way to a solution that the reader may not have imagined. That is the way to encourage original work.

The ace editor learns to paint a portrait of her experience reading something, so that the writer can test that against what he or she hoped to accomplish, and then go back to the computer and try again.

Welcome, Readers.

I suppose I am used to imagining readers. After all, I’m a novelist. I’ve sat at this very screen, inventing characters and scenes and stories, and inevitably, lodged in that act is the idea that someone, somewhere will read it. I am also an editor, and clients come to me with their own stories–imagined stories and life stories–and they come to me because they want those stories to end up in the hands of other people.

Thaisa Frank talks about this process of your work being read as the necessary destruction of the work. She likens it to Tibetan sand drawings, intricate designs created entirely in colored sand. After people view these, or perhaps as people view them, they are destroyed. Sand, people–no glue, no plexiglass cover screwed down tight–just carefully placed grains of sand. Aaaa-choo.

And so it is with our work. We hand it over to a reader or a small mass of them, and the book is destroyed. It becomes something else. The grains of it scatter.

My sons love to eat sand. Their uncle set them up with a sand box in the front yard, and the first thing Charlie did when he got in there was to start shoveling sand into his mouth as if he were bound and determined to win a sand-eating contest. Little hand, scoop and shove, scoop and shove.

“Charlie!”

He looks up, his wee lips ringed in it.

If you can find no readers, birth them.