Writers on Writing: Neil Gaiman

For today’s “Writers on Writing”, I’m turning to another contemporary genre writer, Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is a popular English author, best known for his novels Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and American Gods, as well as his comic book series The Sandman. He has won the Bram Stoker, Hugo, and Nebula awards and the Carnegie and Newbery medals. His novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, was even voted Best Book of the Year in the 2013 British National Book Awards. His book Stardust was adapted into a film in 2007, and American Gods has been adapted into a television series by Starz with Gaiman himself as an executive producer.

For more information on this well-received author, be sure to visit his Wikipedia page.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read much of Gaiman’s works. In fact, I’ve only read Stardust. I haven’t even watched any of the movies based on his work or the American Gods TV series. Even so, I admire the man and I wouldn’t be doing the fantasy, science fiction, or horror genres justice if I didn’t talk about him.

Gaiman, like most writers, has commented on the art of writing. In this post, I want to focus on a remark he made about handling feedback/criticism.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

–Neil Gaiman

I find this quote very interesting as I believe it can be interpreted in two slightly different ways:

1. Writers should be open to criticism because they very likely see something that you don’t. However, if they try and direct how you fix the problem too forcefully, their interference won’t really help because it will get in the way of your creativity and art.
2. When critics say something is wrong or doesn’t work for them, they’re right because it’s their own opinion. You have to choose whether to act on it or not. However, if they try and force their revisions onto you, they’ll be wrong because it’s not your vision if you just follow their suggestions blindly.

No matter which of these interpretations you agree with, the second half of the statement remains the same: do not take critics too seriously if they insist on pushing their specific revisions on you.

Writers can be horrible about receiving feedback. Even if we don’t show it, we take it all pretty personally. I know I do. Feedback, even that with the best intentions, can discourage writers from that work or the craft altogether. Or worse, we ignore good feedback because we’re too attached to what we wrote originally.

Still, we need to know how readers receive our writing. After all, once it’s written and published, it no longer matters what you meant to say; all that matters is what readers think you said. It’s better to know ahead of time and adjust accordingly if we don’t like how our beta readers interpret it. More importantly, they can let us know where we make mental leaps that do not seem like leaps to us. Often we just don’t know when something isn’t as obvious as we see it.

Unfortunately, following feedback too closely could lead to a big mess of writing that even we can’t stand to read anymore. In particular, if we blindly believe when someone says that this is wrong with the draft and that we should do exactly this in order to fix it, we could be making a huge mistake and not realize it. Specific advice for how to fix a specific problem is too rigid for writing. Your writing is a growing piece of art, almost alive, in a way. If you let someone else to tamper so closely without any boundaries, they might coerce you into snipping off a life-sustaining root that only you knew about.

Of course, I don’t think Gaiman means to ignore them entirely. After all, he said that they are almost always wrong when they tell you exactly what is wrong in your writing and how to fix it. You should always keep your mind open to feedback. Regardless, take the second kind of feedback with a grain of salt. The critics cannot know your whole vision for your work; only you do. You know what it should grow into, and so you should follow your instincts about the work and use feedback more as…guidelines.

What is your interpretation of Gaiman’s advice? How should we handle feedback that points out specific problems and gives specific solutions? And where exactly is the line between being open to feedback and being pliable? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!