I married an engineer. Married him, and didn't think twice about it. Because when I married the engineer, I was working a cool, calculating job that had me typing out measured words behind a keyboard half a world removed from the things I wrote about. In fact, I couldn't talk to my husband about my old job, but because feedback came in droves from my colleagues, it was never Beth alone against the world.
Some of you may have gathered that I have spent the last three years of my life holed up in my home and writing. (Let's get real: I might have written one and a half unpublished books, but a handful of published (unpaid) essays are all I've got to hang my hat on as a writer.) Writing for yourself is different from writing for an organization. For one thing, there's no editing team, no mandatory peer and external review. In fact, the only person you can rely on to critique your work is the very person who created it: you. So from the outset of trying to mold myself into a real writer, I tried to rely on the only other person in my home (my husband) to provide some of the feedback I craved.
The very first time he read the first chapters of my novel, I received the following response: "I'm surprised, you actually wrote a story."
Gee, thanks, I thought. And I asked things like, "How about how it makes you feel? And did I get everything in there: the weather, the smells and sounds and the other people? Does it seem real?"
"I don't know. I don't read," he said.
Admittedly, those first few chapters were a pile of slag. I have rewritten them so many different times that I've lost track. With every subsequent reading of those same chapters, my husband's reaction has remained the same: "Yes, it's a chapter. It's a story."
"Right. But is the story better?" I beg. "Does it move along? Do you see what I'm trying to do with the symbols, with my protagonist's feelings? Could you feel yourself there?"
"You should read The Martian," my husband informed me. Besides James and the Giant Peach, this was the first book I've seen the engineer read, so my expectations were high. Pages in, I found the book so tedious that I wanted to scream. I tried to forge through in search of something fantastic, but I never could finish it. The last time I put it down, I looked over at my husband's sleeping head and thought, why have I ever asked for your input on my work? I write emotions, and you like this scientific reasoning garbage.
The only essay I've written that has elicited a response from my engineer husband is one I published under a pseudonym; one which the world doesn't even know I wrote. So there's that.
When I finished my most recent essay, a mash-up of fighter pilot stories, I passed it off to my husband. He had a cameo in the story, and he'd been there to witness the evening I spent most of my essay describing. My husband read the essay, and wrote a few lines above my description of that months-ago two-martini night. In his fastidious all-capitals drafting script, he wrote, "I do not grin. I only raise one eyebrow at a time."
Feeling again like I'd gotten no usable feedback from my engineer husband, I passed the essay off to our engineer friend. He read it. When he read the comments my husband had written in the margins, he laughed. Otherwise, his face was stoic and unmoved. "And?" I asked him, as he passed over the sheets of paper. "I can tell you wrote it," he responded.
Thanks? I thought. "But, did it make you feel anything?" Blank stare from wide blue eyes. That's a no.
Needless to say, if I drew my worth as a writer from the engineers who surround me in life, I'd be through. All this is just to say I've decided I need to go away to an artistic commune of some sort if I ever want to be around people who can give me real feedback, positive or negative, about my work.
At least the
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