Ignoring feedback
I guess it's worth thinking about when you ought to stick to your guns.
Every time I’ve workshopped a story or essay or portion of a novel, I’ve gotten one recurring piece of feedback: that I rely too heavily on specific pop culture references. My MFA advisor asked to speak with me about it once, wanted to know why I kept doing it, why I referenced things like Ryan Adams’ cover of “Wonderwall” or a lightsaber fight on Mustafar or Frightened Rabbit’s Pedestrian Verse. He wasn’t punitive about it or even annoyed. He was the best kind of advisor, the kind who genuinely wanted to know why you made the choices you did. To quote Ted Lasso quoting Walt Whitman, he was curious, not judgmental.
I’m guessing I shouldn’t do this based on the feedback I keep receiving, but I lean into it because it’s the way we process things, or at least the way I process things. In a tense moment, I’m not thinking about the sounds around me or the feeling in my gut. I’m thinking shit, this reminds me of the scene in The Lion King when the antelopes start charging in the valley. I’m not saying those descriptive passages are bad, but I think that when something happens, what sticks with us is that it reminds us of the way a song makes us feel or the look on a face in a scene from a movie or TV show we love. That’s what I’m trying to get across when I do this. The characters I make up, I want them to think the way we do with our favorite films and books and memories and who knows what else. After all, that’s part of the goal of any art, right? To reflect what we experience in the world around us?
I’ve been working my way through these thoughts for years, and I’m still not sure I’ve come up with a good way to articulate them. It helps to keep trying, though.
Some recommendations:
I wrote about a few books that inspired The Jackals.
Speaking of, The Jackals is now available wherever you buy books. If you like it, it would mean the world to me if you left a review on Goodreads, Amazon, etc. It helps the little guys like me get noticed.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Francis of Delirium. There’s a haunting honesty to their music that’s almost hypnotic. Or, maybe the cold weather just has me bummed.
Cheers, y’all.