When the emperors are in the buff.

"Who would want to have called Wuthering Heights, not too long after it had appeared, 'a crude and morbid story'...?"
(Anthony Brandt, in the foreword to Bill Henderson’s Rotten Reviews: A Literary Companion)

Now that I’ve finished doing the major work on the edits for Trades of the Flesh, I have a moment to compose a post that has been flitting around my brain for several weeks now; namely one on the strange experience that is having the fruits of your creative labours out there for public consumption, reaction and comment. I think this is something that affects a lot of writers (and other artists) very profoundly, and it’s such a huge and complex subject that I couldn’t possibly presume to cover it comprehensively, but because I have seen the impact it has had on quite a number of people, it was something I wanted to say a few words about anyway.

First, the obvious – praise is always awe-inspiring, and very touching to boot. I have been overwhelmed by the kindness of people who have got in touch with me to tell me that they couldn’t put my book down, or that it distracted them from their troubles during a trying time in their lives, or that the characters felt real and human to them. My brain still hasn’t fully adjusted, I don’t think, to the strangeness of something that began life as my private creation being out there in the vastness of the world, and so it’s humbling and soothing when someone is thoughtful and kind enough to get in touch with me to say something positive about my work. It’s a powerful thing, and I know I’m not the only author who feels this way. Thank you all.

But there are two sides to every coin, and just as there are times when an artist’s confidence will be boosted by praise, there will also be times when they are attacked. And if the praise has such a powerful impact on them, you can imagine what the criticism does. I should make this absolutely clear right now: THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG POST IS NOT TO IMPLY THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS VALID CRITICISM. If the criticism is valid, there’s not much else to say, and I have said in the past that there is no such thing as perfection. I suspect that many artists (of whatever description) are all too aware of that: if anything, many of them overstate their own flaws. So please, don’t read this and come to the conclusion that I am encouraging people to be egomaniacal monsters who believe their every effort to be immaculate. This post is about something different: I simply want to discuss the many facets of the way people react to a work of art, be it a book, film, painting, piece of music or anything else, because after witnessing the effects of criticism on the confidence of some of my most talented friends, as well as reading hatchet-job reviews of some of the artistic creations I love most, I do think it’s quite reasonable to point out that such condemnation is not always as fair as it could be. I’m not going to cite chapter and verse on friends unless they themselves have discussed things publicly, but I’ll use examples from a variety of sources across the arts (including a bit of speculation on the aspects of my own work that I can imagine being unfairly judged, just to keep things fair). This is one of those matters that puts us all in the same boat!

"Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular, one must be a mediocrity."
(Oscar Wilde)
Or, to put it another way, you can’t please all the people all the time. It’s a heavily-used expression, but true nonetheless – there are so many people in the world, and their perceptions and views and opinions are so varied that it is impossible to produce a work of art that will be universally admired. It’s an obvious point to make, but all too easy to lose sight of. In particular, there are a number of ways in which an artist may – deliberately or otherwise – offend, irritate or bore the consumer, and here are a few of them:


Does the person know what they’re talking about?
One of my pet hates is the massive overblowing of the "frigid Victorian" stereotype. Yes, the era has been noted for its outward conservatism, as well as the limited sexual understanding that was frequently fostered in daughters of middle- and upper class families - although not in those from working class backgrounds: it’s a bit difficult to be coy and innocent when you share a small living space and witness your mother (and/or neighbouring women) falling pregnant and giving birth year after year! But concealment does not equal non-existence, and if you care to consult sources such as Ronald Pearsall’s excellent The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality, you also come to learn, as I did, that the Victorians utilised the services of prostitutes just as often as people in any other era (those weren’t flower sellers Jack the Ripper was carving up, y’know), devoured and even collected pornography in all its forms (including that made utilising the new photographic and film technologies) and came up with some truly filthy jokes (at least one of which has made its way into Trades of the Flesh). Even back in the 19th Century, the Brits had a reputation for being rather fond of the rough stuff: S&M was known throughout various countries in Europe as "the English vice" - something else that appears in Trades. (By the way, "the French vice" was oral sex, as those who have read Mirrors have probably guessed.)

Even the archetypal Victorian – Queen Vic herself – was not the prude she is often made out to be: her diaries include entries which bring to mind the sentiment "Got some last night", and if anything, it was the pregnancies resulting from her dalliances with Prince Albert that Victoria resented, not the dalliances themselves. (She opined that the pregnant state made her feel rather like a cow, and that many babies, particularly her son Leopold, were rather ugly. Albert’s body, on the other hand, was "beautiful".) The Victorians did not cover piano and table legs to prevent any sensitive souls from swooning – they did find it rather amusing that some of their American contemporaries were said to do that very thing, but America was (and is) an independent nation, not ruled by Queen Victoria, and therefore the people coming over all unnecessary at the sight of instruments and furniture weren’t Victorians, any more than modern day Americans are 'subjects' (I hate that word!) of Elizabeth II. And of course, if the Victorians were all but asexual, we wouldn’t be here to be slapping such labels on them, but a significant number of people don’t seem to realise this. Hopefully, the fact that in Trades of the Flesh I am writing about prostitutes and pornographers will limit that book’s exposure to these sorts of assumptions, but if you write about a Victorian female in any other profession who isn’t dead from the neck down, you can expect at least one person to be most put out that you aren’t reinforcing their stereotypes.

It’s not just Victorian women who are judged unfairly. There’s another lazy stereotype that always makes me want to weep: the idea that all Victorian men were wife-beating misogynists who raped the servants on the side and probably knew who the Ripper was, but just didn’t fancy telling. If you create a historical male who is human, you’ll fall foul of these people. When I first got in touch with my agent, he remarked that he liked the fact that while my male characters are products of their time in many respects and their views aren’t always the sort of thing one would want to condone today, they aren’t portrayed as monsters either. I was so glad to hear this, because that’s the balance I try to achieve. If you write off every historical person, real or fictional, because you don’t agree with everything they say, think and do, you’ll struggle to see the good in 99% of those who have gone before us.

I could go on listing these erroneous assumptions about historical people, but this piece is quite long enough, so I’ll stop here. Perhaps one day I’ll post my top ten list of infuriating misconceptions of Victorians in a separate entry, but for now I’ll push on and point out that these misinformed judgements aren’t limited to historical fiction. I once read a customer review on Amazon of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that berated the novel’s autistic protagonist for not considering the feelings of others! You might as well tell Blind Pew to look harder. Coleridge’s criticism of Milton also brings to mind this sort of mentality: "...there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagery from scriptures..." Er...the poem is about Lucifer’s expulsion from Heaven. It was rather inevitable that the original mythology was going to be a major source.

Alternatively, their interpretation of things may be bewildering in itself: the first episode of the sitcom Father Ted apparently received at least one review claiming that it was "predictable". One of the writers says that when he read that review, he sat down in front of the TV with a notebook and pencil and jotted down everything in that episode that he didn’t think was predictable at all. After reaching the point where Dougal studies the window frame through a pair of binoculars and sees giant ants, only to calmly set the binoculars down and say "The ants are back again, Ted"; the writer (I can no longer remember whether it was Mathews or Linehan - forgive me) put down his pad and pencil and came to the conclusion that the reviewer was on a different plane of reality when it came to what was and wasn’t predictable. My unofficial mentor once remarked, in a speech she was delivering around the release of her second novel, that a review of her first (The Infernal, which is a fantastic read – don’t listen to Kim on this one!) had dismissed it as "a thinly-veiled wish fulfilment fantasy". As Kim pointed out, who feels that their fondest wish is to sell their soul to the devil and be pursued by a madman throughout eternity as a result?!


Are they considering the matter fully?
I’m going to use an example from my own work here, because editing Trades has caused the Anatomy Act of 1832 to loom large my mind. (My mind’s a strange place to live, obviously.) For those who were unaware, the Act granted the bodies of paupers and workhouse inmates to the medical profession in addition to the corpses of executed criminals, and in effect it put paid to the widespread practice of body-snatching. However, those who’ve read Cover the Mirrors will know that several of the characters still fear their bodies being illegally exhumed in the 1850s, and with the 20:20 vision of hindsight, it has occurred to me, as I immersed myself in the world of Henry Shadwell, the surgeon in Trades, that the fears of the Mirrors cast may seem anachronistic. However, I was aware of the Act when I wrote Mirrors as I’m aware of it now. What I’m less convinced about is the notion that the characters would understand all its implications, especially given that the ones I was talking about didn’t come from a particularly educated background and therefore didn’t know much about legal matters. Fear of something can, does and has continued after the threat itself has passed – ask any psychologist dealing with phobias. Also, a popular criticism of the Act was that it effectively condemned the poor to the same fate as murderers (something the working classes understandably found offensive), and working class people found it harder to see the delineation between that aspect of the Act and body-snatching, and I imagine that explaining the source of the new influx of bodies would bring them little comfort.

Given my time again, would I still have my characters voice those fears, even though they didn’t understand that said fears were almost certainly unfounded? Yes, for the reasons I just outlined – I think that what a person or group of people believes can be just as important in fiction as the truth in their circumstances, because it tells you something about that person or group. Would I find a way to have a character argue that those fears were indeed unfounded? I’d probably try, but unlike Trades, Mirrors doesn’t have a suitably knowledgeable character who appears for any length of time and at the right moments, so I don’t know who I could have had delivering that explanation without it seeming contrived. But if challenged, I would defend my characters’ not understanding everything about the world they live in – how many people today do, even with our improved education and communications?

On the other hand, it may be that the reader is the one who is unaware of the full story, not the characters. Recently, in a conversation that had nothing to do with books, someone I know remarked that it was only very recently (as in 20th Century) that men began wearing wedding rings. This is sort-of true, but it’s not the full story. The two-ring ceremony actually grew in popularity among the upper and middle classes during the 19th Century, and men with the means to do so often wore a ring – for starters, they didn’t have the sort of manual jobs in which a ring would be dangerous, and it also acted as an outward display of wealth as you could afford to buy his-and-hers rings instead of just one. Wedding rings for working class men did indeed take longer to become popular, and I think it was this that moulded the understanding of the person I was talking to: she had noted when she was growing up that the older male members of her family didn’t wear wedding rings, but then she comes from a working class background, and most of those relatives were manual labourers. But just because they didn’t wear wedding bands, it doesn’t mean that other men didn’t, either at that time or even earlier. I caved and worked a subtle explanation of this issue of wedding rings into Trades, but it’s always a fine line between informing the reader and spoon-feeding them. I certainly don’t want to patronise anyone (if anything, I probably under-explain in a bid not to do this), but every writer is faced with the challenge of pitching these things correctly, and you can only do your best.


Were they paying attention?
On the BBC website for Lilies, one of my favourite TV dramas in the last five years, there is a guestbook page that allows people to submit their comments. While flicking through the messages people had left, I came upon one claiming that it made no sense that the three Moss sisters were Catholic, but their father and brother were Orangemen. This is explained in the script: the father is Protestant, the late mother was Catholic, and so when they fell in love and married in spite of the cultural barriers, they came to an understanding that their daughters would be raised in the mother’s faith and their sons in the father’s. This is not without historical precedent: such families did exist, and presumably still do.


Have they actually read/seen/heard the piece they’re criticising?
Usually, the answer here is yes. However, the more controversial an artist’s work, the more likely they are to find it being attacked by those who have only heard of it – usually through a disapproving and possibly ill-informed source, such as the churches in America who claim that Marilyn Manson kills puppies on stage – and haven’t bothered to actually check these things out for themselves. To use an example from the literary world, how many of the appalled ‘reviews’ of, say, The God Delusion appear to have been based on the title alone, because their authors have already made up their minds about anyone who is prepared to argue that their deity of choice is a delusion? Likewise, I suppose the fact that Molly (from Mirrors) is a fraudulent medium may raise the hackles of practicing Spiritualists today (even though I adopt a policy of not discussing any medium other than Molly), but again, that’s probably inevitable. Still, such reviews say far more about their authors than the book or the author they attempt to dismiss.

Some artists have criticised the customer review system on Amazon because of this – after all, you can ‘review’ a book, film or CD without actually reading, seeing or listening to it, and that is not fair. However, I’m not all that sure that the world of professional reviewing is so much better: I’ve seen some insightful and well-written reviews on Amazon, and some absolute bilge masquerading as serious journalism. A ‘professional’ reviewer can be just as ignorant, inattentive and narrow-minded as anyone else, and if the Amazon review system were to be removed, it wouldn’t solve that problem.


Is this your target audience?
Why in the name of sanity do people think that something not being to their taste makes it bad? I don’t like sci-fi, so I don’t read or watch a load of sci-fi only to tell everyone it bored me. The ones who actually have enough self-awareness to point out that the genre they’re insulting isn’t really their thing are even more bizarre – if it’s not your thing, did you ever expect to like it?! Are you hoping that the writer will take up your genre of choice instead, just to please you?


Are they reacting on prejudice to you or your characters, or expecting you to confirm their worldview?
A review of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray rather betrayed the reviewer’s attitude to Wilde himself with the description "...unmanly, sickening, vicious...and tedious". (Wilde was not tried or imprisoned for his homosexuality until four years after Dorian Gray’s publication, but as with many gay celebrities today, the rumours began circulating some time before the outing itself.) Charlotte Bronte famously wrote to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey to ask his opinion of her work, and while Southey admitted that she was talented, he also felt the need to declare that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be". (Outwardly, Bronte’s reply was meek, but she clearly didn’t let Southey stop her from publishing her works...) The homophobia and sexism of these responses are time-appropriate, but that doesn’t mean we can consign such bigotry to the past: a quick look out of the window will show you that people still impose their reactionary views on others.

Even if you yourself are not the subject of your critics’ spluttering rage, your characters may well be. I know that for a significant number of people, the fact that Molly chooses to have an abortion in Mirrors (it’s alluded to in the cover blurb, so I don’t think that constitutes a plot spoiler) will cause a little door in their minds to slam shut on her, and they’ll turn their attentions to muttering darkly about "loose virtue", "baby-killers" and "what women were ‘designed’ to do". I find such attitudes frustrating (primarily because of the damaging effects they have on society and women’s place in it as a whole), but that doesn’t mean I regret having Molly make that decision, or think that she should have regretted it herself. Hell, I wrote that element into the story to make a point, not to pander to the average Daily Express reader’s dystopian vision of how life is or should be.

By the way, there’s an easy way to spot many of these dogmatists: they frequently (although not always) use sentences that bear a frightening resemblance to this one:

"I’m not a sexist/racist/homophobe/insert other prejudice here, BUT..."

The second part of that sentence almost always disproves the first. My personal favourite, culled from reading reviews of two of my favourite books – Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin, neither of which are suitable for children or the sort of people who write letters to newspapers and sign them with "Disgusted of..." or something similar – is "I’m not a prude, but..." You are, dearie. No really, you are.

Even if you do write about characters who behave in an indisputably repugnant way (the Nazis, say, or sex criminals), there will still be those who don’t stop to consider that a book’s subject matter doesn’t make it a bad book. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov has been subjected to numerous expressions of this stunted thinking in the past by people who can’t seem to realise that, while Humbert Humbert is an unsavoury character, Nabokov’s writing shows his talent, and does not necessarily condone Humbert’s paedophilia. Those views were aired when the book was first published and they haven’t stopped piping up even to this day. Leslie Stephen was similarly horrified by Edgar Allan Poe (which is, I believe, the intended reaction in horror writing): "After reading some of Poe’s stories one feels a kind of shock to one’s modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images".

Speaking of horror, I was a teenager when the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire was made, and I remember laughing like a drain at a review of the movie in which disquiet was expressed at the cruelty of Lestat de Lioncourt, the film’s vampiric antihero. Lestat is a predator, as, incidentally, are the majority of humans. If you have a problem with that, vampire films may not be the best choice for you.


Are they annoyed because you haven’t done things the way they would have done them?
The word that springs to mind here is "So?". If you read a book and come to the conclusion that you would have explained something in another way, had a character’s fate turn out differently or viewed the story from the perspective of a different character, you’ll know what to do when you write your own book with your own plot and characters, won’t you?


Are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t?
This goes back to the idea of not being able to please everyone. If you have an accessible style, there will be those who will slate you for your supposedly cheap and throwaway prose. If you’re more literary, others will call you pretentious. It’s impossible to prevent both from happening. Jane Wenham-Jones, author of one of my favourite books on writing (Wannabe a Writer?) described the baffling array of rejection letters she received when trying to sell her first novel: "The heroine was both weak and too assertive. She was unbelievably naive and much too sharp-edged. There was an abundance of her mother in evidence and also not enough. It had a strong beginning and a slow start. The ending was unusual and predictable. My favourite sub-plot needed to stay in and be taken out". If you take those sorts of things to heart, not only will you never write another word for fear of criticism, you’ll go stark raving mad.

*

So, given all this, why does it still hurt so much when our creative offspring are criticised? Because it’s inevitable – my child analogy was no accident. We conceive our works in private, spend time nurturing and growing them, and when the day comes that they head off into the cruelty of the world, we are as afraid as any parent trembling as they walk away from the school gates after leaving their child there for the first time. Even when an artist claims to revel in the criticism they receive (rock stars are particularly prone to this), there is often an air of "protesting too much", and it’s difficult to imagine that they would have preferred criticism to acclaim. We all become the subject of criticism in our lives, but the dramatically public nature of reviewing magnifies its sting a hundredfold: if someone doesn’t like you or what you do, their disapproval isn’t usually communicated to the entire readership of a newspaper or magazine and/or anyone with a computer and a modem. A lot of writers are very private people – I know I am – and for them such public criticism will not only be hurtful (more hurtful than many of the critics perhaps realise), but anathema to their very natures.

Moreover, the effects can be damaging. I know that when I was in the process of submitting Mirrors to agents, while simultaneously working on Trades, if the postman arrived with a rejection letter while I was in the middle of a scene, it seriously dented my confidence to the point where I often struggled to continue with the task in hand. Psychologists speak of the primacy and recency effects: the primacy effect refers to the tendency for a first exposure to something to remain paramount in a person’s mind; the recency effect has much the same meaning, except that it is the most recent occurrence that takes precedence. A person whose personality favoured the primacy effect would base their views of themselves and their abilities on those of the first person who passed comment on the subject; a person with a strong sense of the recency effect would find their self-image coloured by the most recent feedback they have received. I’m definitely in the latter category: as I say, rejections of my first book caused tremors in my faith in my ability to write my second; but on a happier note, praise has helped me to work up sufficient nerve to take steps that ultimately led to some important developments. Without the praise of my test readers, Debbie, Jen and Fatma, I doubt I would have been able to keep ploughing on though the rejections until I finally sent the fateful email to Macmillan that led to Cover the Mirrors’ publication. A lovely email from a complete stranger gave me enough of a boost so that I felt able to send a query to the agent who now represents me – in fact, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that email in this blog yet; so Helena, if you’re reading this, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

But if it has such a negative impact when your work is criticised – even (or particularly!) when said criticism is flawed, as discussed above – what can you do? I propose a number of possible attitudes and approaches: take on board as many or few of them as suit your individual nature.


How many factors could influence a person’s view of your work? How many of them reflect on the person themselves, rather than you or your art?
This basically refers to everything I’ve just said above. If it happens that an attack on your creation is ill-informed, underdeveloped, prejudiced or downright illogical, this is not your fault. It’s easier to say this than to do it, but try to remember that your critics are as flawed as the rest of us, and their opinions not necessarily worth trembling before.


By extension, is the person someone you were never going to please?
Some people deserve to be offended. That’s not a very politically correct thing to say, but I’m not a very politically correct person. There’s a reason one can buy t shirts proudly emblazoned with the slogan Hated by the Daily Mail, and if you’re honest with yourself, you can probably think of at least one group of people about whom you can say that if something or someone has offended that group, then something has been done right.


Project yourself into a third party’s shoes
Imagine that one of your creative friends has come to you, upset because their work has been dismissed in the way yours has. When the personal element is removed, it’s often easier to see the flaws in an argument, and you may be better able to console this hypothetical friend than yourself. What would you tell them, to reassure them that their creation is not necessarily as bad as may have been suggested? (The rest of this post should get you started!)


Time has proved several naysayers wrong in the past, and it will do so again.
This is where we can only look to the annals of history to see where people have dismissed the staying power of books that remain in print to this day, long after the deaths of the authors of both the book and the hatchet-job review, so have a selection:
"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre [by Charlotte Bronte] are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflection upon it is that it will never be generally read."
(The North British Review on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights)

"In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention [this work] as a curio."
(Emile Zola on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal)

"We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation...Fifty years hence...our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day."
(The Saturday Review on Charles Dickens)

"I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language."
(A rejection letter to Rudyard Kipling from the San Francisco Examiner)
You see?


Go right back to the beginning. Why did you start doing what you do?
For the majority, I doubt that it was the prospect of reviews that caused you to pick up a pen, sit down at a keyboard, take up your instrument or start treading the boards. I postulate that one of the reasons it hurts so much when one’s creative works are slagged off is that the creator almost feels as if they have been maligned for doing something they are compelled to do, but it is important to remember that those compulsions have nothing to do with the critics. One of my favourite musicians, Emilie Autumn, explained this in a way I particularly like, when she was asked whether she wrote her Opheliac album with any person or group of people in mind. It’s lengthy, but worth relaying I think.

"Actually, no...it may sound terrible, but the person that I wanted to address when I made the music was me, and I really didn't care if anybody bought it. It sounds terrible because I'm very, very grateful for the people that that have - they're the reason why I'm here, it's fantastic – but...I don't think I'm in a place to attempt to address any sort of person because I don't think I have the right to do that. I'm not a role model; I'm not even a role model for myself, I'm just somebody who is artistically creative.

"If there is any one message that I would like any of the fans I'm fortunate to have to take away from any of what I do, it is actually that you do what you do without an incredible amount of concern for what the opinions of people who are hearing you. And I think that it's an awful thing if you're an artist and you change in any way what you do because of outside pressures, because they have NOTHING to do with it, and any artist in the history of the world who's ever done something that has actually changed anything or made something that was really, really important has not given a fuck about anybody else. It's a clichéd story by now, but everybody knows that when Beethoven's 5th Symphony came out, everybody was like, 'That is the ugliest piece of shit I've ever heard!'...I think that if there is anybody that respects me for what I do, that's actually the thing they respect: the fact that I don't care what they think. It sounds horrible, but I don't think it is."


How many of the artworks you love the most have been slated at one time or another?
I’ve included numerous examples in this post, and I couldn’t even call that the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve been viciously and/or unfairly maligned, whoever you are and whatever you do, you may take some comfort from knowing that you’re in extremely good company. In this blog post, I’ve included an assortment of quotes – some from the critics on the subject of well-known pieces of work; others from well-known people on the subject of critics. Clearly, little has changed over the years when it comes to the relationship between the two.


Is your critic perhaps jealous?
"Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him."
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)

This sounds like such a clichéd thing to say, and I know that by including it I’ll be opening myself up to attack from skim-readers who aren’t absorbing this post’s exact purpose ("The arrogance of it all!"), and to those people, I suggest scrolling back up and re-reading the words in capitals in the fourth paragraph. Of course jealousy isn’t the only motivation for criticising something or someone. Neither is prejudice, a lack of information or anything else I’ve mentioned so far. But the fact remains that those factors do play a part in the formation of many opinions, and those who are struggling to get a foothold in your field of choice may well be resentful of you and others for reaching a place they have not yet managed to reach themselves. James Russel Lowell’s words are appropriate in these cases: "Nature fits all her children with something to do. He who would write, and can’t write, can surely review."

This is the classic "I could have done it better!" sentiment, and when they say such things, they aren’t necessarily right.

On the other hand, perhaps they aren’t trying to get where you are now, but just enjoy knocking down the efforts of others. This is the bully mentality that starts in childhood and never really goes away: it changes form, that’s all. When he appeared on Room 101, Stephen Fry slated this sort of attitude when he imagined a scenario in which these people stand at the gates of Heaven before St Peter and explain what they did with their lives: "Well, I looked at what other people did, and I said, 'That doesn’t really work...'"


On the flip side, can you accept compliments?
If you have a really negative mindset, you may find yourself stewing for days over negative feedback, while brushing off the positive, perhaps assuming that the one praising you is just being nice. Needless to say, this is not healthy. There is something to be said for not allowing any outside opinion to affect you dramatically: the metal vocalist Tairrie B is fond of saying (and I don’t know whether these words are her own or whether she’s quoting someone else – I can’t find any attributions to another party) that if you don’t let the accolades define you, the insults can’t diminish you. I don’t know about can’t (the negative mindset I just described would find a way to allow exactly that), but you may find that you’re better able to retain your sanity if you aren’t constantly looking to other people’s views of you, whatever those views may be. Just make sure that you don’t dismiss only the positive while taking the negative to heart!

But yes, compliments. How do you react when someone tells you they enjoyed your work? It’s fine to be bashful, flattered, overwhelmed, even astounded that your work has touched the life of someone who is perhaps a stranger to you, but if you just write the praise off as irrelevant or motivated by anything other than genuine admiration, then there’s a problem. If you’re published, are you remembering that others have invested in your work? That’s a surreal thought, and one that fledgling authors struggle with, but it is important to keep in mind that agents and commissioning editors don’t take books on out of the goodness of their hearts (as much as it may feel that way!) – they take them on because they believe that those books will sell and earn everyone money. Published and/or agented authors, let me spell it out: at least one of these professionals has that kind of faith in you. Are you remembering that?


If you are permanently crucifying yourself over actual or anticipated criticism, your output will grind to a halt.
It really will. You’ll destroy vast amounts of your own work for fear of what others will say, scribble out words and sentences as soon as you’ve written them, refuse to even attempt to work on that idea that’s been kicking around in your head in case you can’t do it justice. Writers write, actors act, musicians make music and artists make art. If you let your fear stop you from doing what you do, you’re destroying more than your own confidence. For writers, an editor will later provide a ‘safe’ buffer between you and the world at large (see below), but if you don’t have anything to show him or her, they can’t help.


The queries of editors are not the same as uninformed assumptions.
If an editor or copyeditor has queried a fact in your work that you can defend as accurate, that’s not the same as someone claiming that your work is inaccurate when it isn’t. Editors deal with a vast array of subject matter, and they can’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all of it. Part of their job is to ask questions when they aren’t sure of a writer’s meaning, but this isn’t the same as the professional or amateur reviewer who doesn’t bother to check their facts before claiming inaccuracy. In the course of editing both my books, my editor has asked questions about all manner of things, including when Queen Victoria first became interested in Spiritualism, the historical accuracy of various slang terms and when Baptist worship was first practiced in Preston.

In case you’re curious, I check all cant in my well-thumbed Dictionary of Historical Slang, Baptists have been around in Preston since the 1750s and their church on Fishergate was built in 1858, and the Queen’s interest in Spiritualism was NOT, as a depressing number of people just seem to assume without checking, something that came about only after her beloved husband’s death. I quote Ronald Pearsall in The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult, although the underlining is mine: "Table-turning was a parlour amusement for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. As early as 1846, the Queen had taken an interest in the occult..." (The character of Henry Shadwell is in my head again, scolding those who assumed a connection with the Prince’s death for their unscientific corner-cutting!)

I do not include my editor in this category. I never take his queries as slurs on my research; he’s asking questions, as he’s supposed to do. He is NOT saying that I’m wrong and he knows best, even though he clearly hasn’t bothered to avail himself of the facts. Come to think of it, I should probably capitalise this sentiment, too: IF YOU HAVE A GOOD EDITOR, THEY ARE ASKING QUESTIONS, NOT PASSING JUDGEMENT. The key difference is the attitude with which the question is posed, and the willingness to accept it if the evidence shows otherwise. Will has been more than happy with my explanations when he has asked about things such as those described above.


Is it worth putting yourself through it all?
If that sounds depressing, fear not – I’m not about to say that only those who aren’t remotely upset by unreasonable attacks on their art should be practicing that art at all. There wouldn’t be many artists out there if that were the case! You may decide that you would prefer to keep your creations to yourself of course, and that is quite reasonable, but if you prefer something a little less drastic, I propose an alternative that may make things easier. If, after reading all this, you still find that the prospect of your work being unfairly maligned puts more stress on you than seems tolerable or practical, I wouldn’t blame you in the least. I wrote this lengthy beast, and my powerful relationship with the recency effect still means that I fear the impact of slurs against my existing works on my ability to produce new ones. So what do I do? I don’t go searching for reviews of and references to my book. Sometimes my publicist Sophie will send me one she thinks I’ll like, and that’s always a nice boost, but because I know myself, I avoid seeking out the opinions of others.

In the run-up to Mirrors’ release, I used to have a Google Alert set up that would notify me of any new mention of my book on the internet, and immediately following publication I checked my Amazon reviews on a daily basis. (I managed to avoid the addiction to checking my Amazon rank number that plagues so many writers, though.) But over time, I realised that this monitoring had the potential to head off into obsessive-compulsive territory, and that if I were to see something negative, it would be more damaging than it was worth to subject myself to it, so I disabled the Google Alert and stopped looking at my Amazon reviews before I could see something that would be unnecessarily distressing. I don’t know what’s being said about my work, and on balance, I don’t think it’s worth driving myself potty to find out. As I said to a friend who kindly let me know that she’d enjoyed Mirrors, I don’t even ask friends what they thought of it, partly because I don’t want to put them in an awkward position if they didn’t like it, and partly because that knowledge would put more strain on me than I think is proportionate. That may sound irrational, but that’s my point – if you know that you have the classic ‘artistic temperament’ whereby dismissal of your work can have such a dramatic effect that it harms your ability to produce more, it may be irrational, but that doesn’t change your nature. You must find a way to manage with what you have, and so I have come to the conclusion that I am happy to keep doing what I do as I have always done it, before my writing ever appeared in Waterstone’s and Borders or on Amazon, and occasionally allow the kind words of someone who chooses to tell me that they appreciated my efforts to give me a pleasurable glow. What the hell, they deserve some capitals too: IN THIS AGE OF APATHY AND TAKING THINGS FOR GRANTED, YOU ARE TO BE APPLAUDED FOR YOUR THOUGHTFULNESS AND KINDNESS WHEN YOU MAKE A POINT OF ACKNOWLEDGING THE HARD WORK OF OTHERS. THANK YOU.

I should point out that I wasn’t being ungrateful to the friend who was sweet enough to tell me that she enjoyed Mirrors - indeed, I thanked her as I thank everyone who is kind about my work. My point is that I didn’t ask her what she thought, as (for the reasons I just described) I don’t seek out the opinions of others. This is probably a good time to point out that if you’ve written me a nice review on Amazon and I haven’t acknowledged it, it isn’t because I’m being ungrateful; it’s because I don’t look at my books’ pages on Amazon, so I don’t know what’s been said there and by whom, and for the sake of my tenuous grasp on sanity, I don’t plan on going there to find out. However, if you’ve been nice about my work on Amazon or somewhere similar, you have indeed given me a wonderful present, and even though I’m not aware of them when they do appear, I appreciate nice Amazon reviews nonetheless. Please consider this paragraph my thank-you.

One of my greatest fears is that I will come to dislike my own work. This does seem to happen with some authors: my unofficial mentor decided some time ago that her first novel had the same toe-curling effect on her as those photos you find of yourself as a teenager (complete with spots and terrible style choices), and it seems she now includes her second book in that category as well. They’re both brilliant (I’ve no idea what she’s talking about!) but while I can understand that the natural development of a writer’s skill means that they will inevitably look back at their earlier creations and see what they would have done differently, I really, really hope that I will never find my firstborn impossible to look at. I can already see the areas in which I’ve developed as a writer since I wrote Mirrors, but I don’t think that fact invalidates the book in its own right. Maybe – and this is pure speculation on my part – unfair criticism of an artist’s work is one of the things that pushes some of those artists into all but disowning their earlier works: the bully mentality and its effect on confidence once again. Perhaps I’m way off and that has nothing to do with it, but I do fear anything that would make me turn on the story and characters to which I gave life.


But at the end of the day, I don’t write my books for those who have a restrictive view of women or our ancestors, or who don’t care for my genre. I don’t write non-fiction, so it’s not my job to correct if anyone has made an erroneous assumption about historical fact. I didn’t write for those people when I wasn’t published, and I don’t write for them now. Do you?

"Pay no attention to what critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic."
(Jean Sibelius)

"Some critics are like chimneysweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from the nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing out from the top of the house, as if they had built it."
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)