It's Okay to Say... Anything

I admit this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I figure now is as good a time as any to get it off of my chest. (I warn you that this gets very, very wordy.)

As a writer, I'm pretty picky. My writing is personal to me, and lots of times it gets impeded by the simple fact that I'm not sure that I can share it. Really, it makes no sense to me at all to write an essay, a story, anything... and just never get around to sharing it.

Don't get me wrong. I've got a ton of items sitting on my hard drive that fall into the category of "Things I never got around to sharing." Half-hearted starts to stories, reviews and columns that never properly got off the ground, everything but poems, really (and that's only because I know that only trouble can come from me attempting free verse). But for the most part, when I do get around to writing something, I end up sharing it. Which leads me to the observation I'm making now which is directed at no one in particular:

It's okay to say... anything.

I want to tell you that when I write something and share it with someone (or everyone) I expect a specific reaction. That rarely happens. The only time I ever feel that way is when I'm goofing off on a message board somewhere and I say something that I assume people will find funny. And even then, I'm not completely sure that's what will happen. The Internet is a fickle mistress.

But without fail when I share things with people, I often find the feedback lacking. It's hard to categorize it, because it's not like I expect a full review or a list of typos or anything specific. But I do expect something out of it.

It's possible that I expect too much, but from my perspective I've put a lot of time into these things. And you have to understand my process here in order to understand my point. When I write... seriously write, I generally just do it. No outlines or anything like that. I just sit at the keyboard and start writing. And when I flow, I flow. I want to be humble about it, but there are times when I have reread a good passage of mine from way back when and am shocked at how well I put it together.

But there are other times. They are dark and terrible times when I hit a wall or get stuck or can't turn the right phrase or any of eight other ways to put it. And what usually happens is that I stare at the end of a paragraph for a few hours, and then I put the whole thing away for a day (or a week... or a month). And then, out of the blue, I'll go back to it, read it from the beginning, and then somehow get inspired when I get to the part I was stuck at before. I find my voice. I reach the end. It was a long struggle, but somehow it all worked out.

Now comes the tricky part. I want to show this to someone. But this is not easy. This is, in fact, harder than the actual writing. Because no matter how good I tell myself I am in my head, no matter how good I truly know that I am when push comes to shove, there will always be that little voice in the back of my head that says, "You know they won't like it." And no, that should never matter, but it does and it sucks that it does.

But forging ahead is what we do in these situations, so I find someone (or two people, or a small army somewhere), I shuffle it around for a few days, and then I finally get around to asking them if they want to check out what I read. They, of course, say yes. Because who passes up a chance to read something from a friend, right? So I send a copy or post it somewhere, and then I wait. Wait, as I said before, for anything.

What do I usually get? Not much. There are several theories I'd imagine for the phenomenon. For starters, it takes significantly less time to read an item than it usually takes to write it. In my head, I've spent hours working on something to make it come out right, and someone else will spend 10-15 minutes reading it. It's probably wrong, then, to expect a reader to give me either the feedback or the validation that I'd expect on the matter. Also, there's the fact that the average person will likely not want to say the wrong thing. Clearly a friend or colleague may not be inclined to tell you that they had a problem with or didn't enjoy something you wrote.

Still, I do find myself wanting a little more feedback on things that I write than I usually get. It's nice to hear, "It was good," or, "That was nice," or, "That was funny..." (although sometimes you don't even hear that...) . But at the same time, I do want to hear more. I'd even want to hear some of the negative, if it meant that there was something to hear.

... okay, not too much negative. But anything is definitely better than nothing.