After he had told me everything he thought was wrong with my
book, he suggested I should withdraw it from publication, rewrite it, and try
again.
At first, he had not known what became of one of the
characters. I e-mailed him a list of page numbers which described the
character’s demise. Then last night, he said he thought I had published BYLINE
too soon. The characters were not developed, he said, and there was no suspense
in the book, and why didn’t I do more with the villain’s grandmother? He didn’t
find anything to like.
I was curiously unmoved. “So what do you think?” he asked.
“I think I’m done with that book. I’m already working on
something else,” I said. The whole thing made me glad I had not agreed to do
any book signings.
I have had some generous five-star reviews from my friends.
And I’ve had suggestions from others. The main character was too ingenuous, one
said. She had worked on school newspapers; she should have known more about the
big metropolitan newspaper. The story about the centaur was too long, another
said. I killed off her parents too soon, someone said. There were too many
characters. Who were all those people?
It should have been longer, someone said. A few people read
the book in one sitting; others apparently couldn’t finish it.
Oh, well.
It made me think of a college production of Mozart’s Don
Giovanni a friend once directed. He made the opera a Gothic horror story,
murky, dark, sinister. Nobody understood what he was after, and a lot of people
had a lot of criticism to offer. “Nobody once asked me what I was trying to
do,” he said.
“What did you learn from this experience?” Last night’s
critic wanted to know.
“I learned that everybody reads differently,” I said.
I thought about something my friend Sue said in response to
an earlier spate of criticism. “I suppose you didn’t write the book he wanted
to read,” she said, kindly.
