Monday, March 28, 2011

Reviews

You’ve read every word of your prose in the draft at least ten times, each time except for the first knowing what’s there. And you detest it. You know you need that first-time sensitivity, but the mind archives everything you’ve read and then reads every word back to you before you even read it on the page. It’s true then that by the tenth time most of the words won’t make sense to you anymore. By the time the book is published, you'll have felt cold about it. If there's hope, then you hope 'for sound, intelligent criticism . . . as writing is the loneliest of all trades.'

You know that many writers are prone to criticism of their works. Is reading reviews such a vice? Like Hem said, it’s destructive to have your book published and then read reviews of it. When critics slight you, you get angry. When they praise you, they say nothing new about you that you don't already know of yourself.

Critics? Aren’t they a bunch who ‘have a habit of hanging attributes on you themselves’?

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