by Lori DeBoer
My husband and I had a whirlwind romance. Our personal and professional lives mesh marvelously; he is a chef and private cooking instructor and I am a writing coach. We were married within a year of our first meeting.
Despite our mutual devotion, I held out on him in one area of my life. Whenever Michael asked to read my short stories, I balked. Since I spent most of my time pounding them out for my MFA thesis, my excuses started sounding . . . dodgy. “When do I get to read your stories?” he would ask. “Why won’t you show them to me?”
I’ve had no qualms about sharing my writing with strangers in critique groups or editors I’ve only met through e-mail. I have been a working writer ever since college, when I landed a job as a newspaper reporter, so I’ve developed a thick skin and a willingness to revise. Still, I’ve been careful, perhaps paranoid, about sharing my writing with anyone I happen to be in a close contact with. If my writing had a calling plan, it would not include friends and family.
My husband kept up his gentle insistence and, with two weeks to go before my thesis due date and three stories to revise, I threw caution aside and e-mailed him my stories. Then I paced and chewed off my fingernails. When he finally emerged from his office, he looked shaken. “These are all so depressing,” he said. He looked at me cautiously. “Are you depressed?”
I tried to explain that I was writing literary short fiction and that the stuff I’d been reading for graduate school mostly had a dark current running through it, in keeping with my genre. My husband wasn’t buying it. “All the men in these stories are assholes,” he said. “Do you even like men?”
That threw me. I was raising a son and had just gotten married to him, a man. I spent the rest of the day torn up by worry. Did he think I was a man hater? Would he fall out of love with me, since my short stories were so gloomy? I was in tears. Being under deadline for my thesis didn’t help.
Once he saw how anguished I was–and that I’d stopped writing—he wanted to talk. “You have to turn these in soon. What can I do to help you?”
It was a struggle for me, but I finally articulated the problems I saw in my remaining stories and my struggle to come up with some solutions. The title story of my collection, “Parrot Love,” was about a young man who had come to his estranged, recently deceased father’s house to sell off an expensive Blue Hyacinth Macaw. My husband pointed out that the son just seemed not only flat and unsympathetic, but that the men in my story didn’t talk and act like men. He also suggested I turn the macaw into a less-expensive parrot that could not only talk, but was skilled at doing impersonations of people, so that the dead father was given a voice in the story. Michael even sat down and reworked the dialogue in places.
Michael reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the story, just as my spirits and energy were flagging. Through our work together, I learned that still thought my stories were the wrong side of dark, but I learned that he had a somewhat more complex view of both me and my stories. Later, when I was in my thesis defense, his observations about the asshole men populating my collection—which had stung and surprised me—meant I was prepared when my all-male committee members asked me to address that same topic.
It was hard to hear someone whose opinions matter so much to me talk candidly about my writing. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about when to seek feedback from a neutral reader and when to seek it from someone more biased.
During my tenure as a writing coach and teacher, I’ve seen lots of beginning writers go through mental gyrations ranging from anxiety to total writer’s block after they’d shared their stories—fiction or not—with loved ones. For example, there was the student who’d given the rough draft of his first chapter to a well-published buddy with whom he’d had a competitive relationship. There was the friend who had a crush on a guy and gave him her first finished essay as a means to connect. In neither case did the recipient of the gift of writing respond.
In nearly every class I teach, someone will come in during the second or third session with a long face. It seems they’ve shared their story with their sister/husband/mother/grandfather and didn’t get the response they had hoped for. I still remember a young woman, who had a great memoir in the works, groaning, “My mom’s upset about what I was writing about, so she’s starting her own book now.”
When you give someone your writing to respond to, it’s important to be clear if you are seeking professional critique or really want to strengthen your position in a tenuous relationship.
Certainly, my first big bylines earned me some respect from people I hadn’t otherwise impressed. I’ve even had a few fleeting friendships with people who fell for me through my writing—nowhere was this more apparent than during the months I was exchanging e-mails with men on match.com. My writing gives a better impression of me on paper than I can in real life. In my short stories and essays, I appear wittier, more sophisticated, more thoughtful and, I suspect, taller and better dressed.
It’s tempting to send your writing into the world as your personal envoy, to curry favor or win love. When you hand someone a story, be honest about what you seek: be it encouragement to keep going, a proposal of undying love or a few suggestions on grammar and structure. The reader who loves you (or wish loved you) brings your relationship history to the work. They are likely to have an agenda for not only the story, but for you. This can be productive or not, depending on the circumstances.
In hindsight, I realize that getting feedback from my husband worked because his agendas for me and my writing were aligned. Because he wants me to succeed as a writer, he diligently gave me the kind of feedback he believed I needed to make my stories succeed. I’m glad to have taken that risk. If Michael hadn’t insisted that I share my writing with him, I would have missed the gift of receiving feedback from someone who knows me—and by extension, my writing—at a deep, intimate level.
Lori DeBoer brings twenty year’s worth of writing and editing experience to her work and has been a writing coach for ten years. She has a broad background in public relations, scholarly writing, creative writing and journalism. She founded and directed The Boulder Writers’ Workshop, a community organization with more than 400 members and offers regular writing classes and workshops in Boulder and Denver. She also founded and directs Associated Writing Coaches. She received her MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University, where she finished a collection of short stories. Her MA is in United States History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her nonfiction books include The Insiders’ Guide to Phoenix and she’s had essays published in Mamaphonic, Creative Nonfiction and Keep It Real: Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Research and Writing Creative Nonfiction.
