Believe
Skiing, lasagne, and the danger of sharing your work.
Thank you for not sharing.
(Transcript)
Hi there.
I'm at the end of a long day of writing and editing.
And, uh, I have a question from a reader.
Here's the question.
Um, I got a piece of feedback on my writing recently that I don't disagree with, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.
I was writing a scene between 2 characters, and my feedback was these characters don't sound italics, believable.
I read through it again, and I thought to myself, yeah, they're right.
This doesn't sound believable at all.
And then I just sat there staring at the page at a scene I've been working on for hours, wondering how the voices I had constructed and my head sounded perfectly natural at the time, and yet when they translate onto the page, they don't sound believable.
So my question for you is less of a question and more of a prompt, believability.
Some further questions if it's helpful.
Do you care about it?
Do you work at it?
How do you imagine the voice of a character in your head?
How do you translate it onto the page?
Is it just through dialogue, or is there another part of your practice that you've developed and worked out over time to make characters sound believable?
How do you track a character's emotional journey, or their individual manner of speaking, and do either play into your process of making a character believable?
Just to reel it back to the beginning, I'm going to start with the idea of believability.
I've been thinking about it a lot.
And I think, after much consideration, that this is a bullshit note.
There are notes that you will get from people that they give you these notes just to get you to go away, or just to have something to say.
See, the problem with getting notes from people is that sometimes they don't have anything to say, and they need to come up with something to say to you, and so what you end up with are bullshit notes, like, it doesn't sound believable.
Throughout your life, you can get all kinds of notes from all kinds of different people, and there's these sort of corporate notes that you can get, and those are the notes that are like, this person's job is to give you notes.
So even if they don't have anything to say, they need to come up with something so they give you these notes.
And you have to take these notes, even though they're pretty useless notes.
And then there's the kind of note that I was just talking about, right?
It's like you ask someone for their opinion.
They don't have anything very specific or useful to say, so they give you something that could not be more vague.
Which is believability.
I don't think I even know what that means in the context of this question.
I don't know what it means to read something and say, I don't believe it when you are reading something that is literally fake.
It is fiction.
Of course, you don't believe it.
It's not real.
Now, I guess what they're trying to get at is that they don't have a real experience when they're reading this dialogue. That they don't have some sort of something that they were expecting, and that's understandable, but here's the thing.
It's a scene.
It's not a complete work.
It's a scene from something that isn't complete yet.
So how do, in fact, they know it's believable when they don't know the context and they don't have the broader piece to look at.
You could take a scene out of like Hamlet, let's say.
And if you forget all about Hamlet.
The scene's not gonna be believable.
Because you don't know what the story is.
You don't know what the end is.
You don't know what the beginning is and you don't know what this particular scene has to do with anything else that's going on.
So the 1st thing that I want to talk about is the fact that People, I believe, should not share incomplete work.
And if you do, There's only a very, very small group of people that you should be sharing it with, people who you really, really trust, people who really understand what you're going for.
Okay?
And they know what you're going for because you have a long history with this person.
But that doesn't just apply to excerpts of your work.
That applies to everything, because I want to get back to the very beginning of this question, in the very beginning of this question.
There was something that was written.
It was given to someone. Someone had a criticism of it.
And then the person, going back to their work, decided it was true.
That worries me.
Because where did that voice in your head come from?
It came from them, possibly.
It came from this person.
They said it's not believable, and now you don't believe it.
But you know what?
You also haven't finished your work.
You also don't have the thing in front of you.
You also are not quite complete on where you're going.
So how do you even know?
If you don't even know, how do they?
It's an incomplete work.
It's still in the idea phase.
And so it should not be analyzed yet.
It is something that should be protected from analysis.
I understand that people want to share their work.
I understand it's a sharing economy.
I understand that you are alone, writing this thing, and you really are desperate to know whether or not you're wasting your time.
And so you reach out to people for input, on what you're making.
But they will not be able to give you input on what you're making until you're done making it, because it's got a beginning and a middle and an end, and all of these pieces fit into that.
So if you're giving something incomplete to someone, then they're going to make a bunch of assumptions about what it is you're making.
And those assumptions could be completely wrong.
So, their criticism then, in my opinion, becomes invalid.
It's something that's not useful to you.
And in fact, in this particular situation, I think it's a detriment.
And I think you should stay away from it.
A lot of the time when people share their work, and it's not ready to be shared, they're doing it, because they need some positivity, they need some motivation, they need a bump to their confidence.
And so they say, I'm going to share just a little bit of this with someone.
And hopefully they tell me that it's good, and then I'll feel better, and then I'll feel more powerful moving forward.
That's the trap that you fall into, right?
Because you can't control what they say.
And if they say something negative or something kind of wishy-washy like believable, then you're in this nebulous zone and you don't know what you're doing anymore because you basically gave them a cake with a gooey center.
All right?
Of course, they don't like the cake.
The cake is not done.
Cake batter is not cake.
Therefore, you can't ask someone how the cake is, right?
Now then that brings up the whole question, like, well, when is something done then?
Well, it's done when you feel like it's good enough.
You're done when you feel like your piece can like take a punch, right?
But even then, even when you're ready, even when it feels pretty solid.
The number of people you should be showing it to is exceedingly small.
All right?
There should be maximum 5 people in your life. That you show a new work to.
People you really trust, who really understand what you do and what you're going for, and everybody else should be in the dark. Until it's ready to roll out to the general public.
I worry a lot about people doing things like this, about talking to people too early, about sharing things too early, because this is really hard.
Telling stories is incredibly hard.
To do it in a way that is good and interesting and new.
And full of energy, it's incredibly difficult.
And so, what you need is momentum.
And you need boldness, and you need to be unafraid.
And honestly, you need to be kind of in your own private little bubble for a long time until you're ready to roll it out.
Criticism that's too early can be a death sentence.
It gets in your head and you can never get it out.
So you really need to be prepared for that criticism.
And the only way to be prepared is to be done and ready.
When your peace is something that you feel ready to fight for, because if it's not finished, if it's an unfinished piece, if it's just bits and pieces, how do you fight for that?
How do you defend it?
It's not anything yet.
You're building a fortress, and it has to be ready for barbarians at the gate.
Now, in hearing this, you might think, I feel like Joe doesn't like a lot of criticism.
And the truth is, who does?
Right?
There's no one's who I don't know of anyone out there who's like, ooh, yeah, criticism.
Woo, here we go, right?
That person doesn't exist.
But I have a problem with people seeking it out, with people putting themselves in a vulnerable position too early.
And that criticism affects their work, and it degrades it, and it makes you 2nd guess yourself.
You need to have boldness.
And it's hard to have that boldness when you've got people kind of snip, snip, snipping at you.
You need to block them out.
There needs to be nobody in your zone while you are in the middle of being bold.
In 1976, Franz Klummer had the weight of all of Austria on his shoulders.
He was a downhill skier, skiing for Austria, and the Olympics were in Austria.
He was on home snow.
Everybody was rooting for him.
There was a lot of pressure on him to win the gold.
And so the big day comes, and he's, like, 15th in line.
And so he's watching all these other skiers goes down the slopes, and he's just kind of getting in his head, and he's getting really worried.
And then along comes Bernard Rusi from Switzerland, and he blazes down the trail, right?
He turns in an amazing time, and everyone says, oh, no.
Oh, no, Franz, what are you gonna do?
We're very worried about Franz.
Is he gonna be able to beat this time?
So Franz gets up there.
It gets ready.
Pulls in hand, and he goes down the slope.
And what follows is what is referred to as one of the greatest downhill runs of all time.
Franz goes very, very fast, but he doesn't just go fast.
He goes crazy out of control fast.
You can still watch the clip on YouTube.
Franz is going down this hill so quickly, but also, it's a little messy.
He almost bites it 5 or 6 times.
People calling from the sidelines are like, oh, oh, it's such a shame that he did that.
Oh, that's definitely going to ruin him.
He almost falls.
His skis are getting a little weird.
He almost just flies into the stands at one point.
I mean, it is a mess, and it is fast, and it turned out to be pretty glorious.
He was bold.
He just went for it.
And for some reason, when you go and you watch this on YouTube, it's like inspiring as a writer.
And it kind of makes you feel like you should just go for it.
You know, block everything else out.
It doesn't matter how messy it is as long as you can cross that finish line in the time you want to cross the finish line.
Someone asked Tony Kushner once about writing plays.
And if there is any sort of analogy he uses for plays, and the analogy that he uses is lasagna, because apparently he likes making lasagna.
And he thinks that a great play should be like a lasagna.
It should have many layers.
There should be a lot of stuff in there.
There should be so much stuff in there that it almost feels like the whole thing is gonna collapse.
When you bring the slice up out of the pan and onto the plate.
It should look like it's about to topple over and just become nothing.
But there's so much in there. That the flavor is amazing, because you are constantly in this dance with destruction.
Because you have boldness.
And to have that boldness is really difficult.
And if you let too many voices into your head too soon, you can lose that boldness, you can start to 2nd guess yourself.
You can end up crashing out on the downhill slope.
You could end up having the lasagna that falls over.
But if you can keep that spirit of boldness, and if you can really tempt destruction like that and block out the other voices and just go, That will be much more beneficial to creating whatever it is you're creating.
And if you do wipe out, if your lasagna does fall over, if you do crash on the slopes, you have at least done something for yourself that that early criticism could never do.
You've learned something.
-j