Sarah Dessen, Bad Reviews and Responding to a Hostile Public
Well, folks, it looks like Mercury Retrograde is in full swing. For once, I'm somewhat on-time to responding to a particular issue. If you aren't aware yet or if you aren't in the literary community, YA author Sarah Dessen made a pointed remark towards a student who made a comment about one of her books. Soon after, said author's author friends jumped in to defend her by slinging mud at this student. Get the full scoop here: https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/famous-authors-drag-student-in-ya-twitter-controversy.html .
Indeed, I'm not going to post a play-by-play of the incident. Instead, I'd like to point out that this is exactly why I'm not reading reviews when I become published. Now, hold your rotten vegetables, hold your wigs and hold your outrage, please. In a few paragraphs, I'll pick a "side", if I have to, and defend my stance.
Authors know that mixed in among the scintillating praise for their works are a few steaming piles of excrement written for the sole purpose of being a total dick. It's true, some people get a rise out of dragging someone's precious work. That's the internet for ya! It's especially hard to avoid those nasty reviews because the sites that host them don't have a particularly strong toxicity filter. It's easy to enforce kindness and objectivity in a critique group, in which the reviewer must face the author in person. It's not as easy to enforce that when the reviewer can hide behind a computer screen and throw any kind of vitriol towards the author and their work, as long as it's not hate speech.
I know that there's a cadre of aspiring and even published authors out there who insist that you have to read your reviews. They'll argue that reviews toughen you, that you have to take the good with the bad, that you have to separate the gold from the dirt in order to become a better author. I dare to oppose that common platitude. Venomous reviews are more detrimental to the author than they are helpful, in my personal opinion. Sure, you'll get a bacteria-sized nugget of gold from them, if you dig really hard. But you'll get mud all over soul. Over time, those venomous reviews just siphon out your inspiration and your creativity.
But that's not the case here. Brooke Nelson, the student who critiqued Sarah Dessen, didn't say anything particularly vitriolic. Sure, her comment about Dessen’s work being good enough for teens, but not for a college reading list sounded a bit flippant. (If there's one thing you shouldn't do in the literary industry, it's that you shouldn't put down other genres, no matter how much you hate them.) But other than that, all she said was that she personally believed that Dessen's novel didn't belong in the Common Reads list. It's a perfectly valid opinion and she back it up masterfully.
As for any claims that Nelson's assessment was a misogynistic attack, I have to disagree. As a feminist myself, let me point out something simple. Claiming that you have to "support teh wimmenz" no matter what kind of content they produce: broke. Lauding authors who shed light on important issues: woke. Attacking another woman just because she didn't include many female authors in her list: white feminism. Seeing the greater point that said woman is trying to make about far greater pieces of literature about racial injustice being overlooked: intersectional AF.
I wonder if the authors who chimed in to attack Brooke Nelson thought about their approach. Did Sarah Dessen take a moment to reflect on what her friends were saying? (As of right now, she still hasn't apologized formally. That's not a bad thing, I'm just stating a fact for my readers to properly assess my blog post.) Because I look at Dessen's comment about "authors being human beings" and I look at all these friends of hers failing to apply that logic to Brooke Nelson. She's a human being, too. Where was the civilized human respect that she deserved just for a stating a harmless opinion?
Indeed, this debacle has only further cemented my decision to not read reviews. Now, I know what you're going to say. "But S.K., why don't you just ignore bad reviews or react civilly to people who critique you?" As of right now, I have a Twitter platform of 14 followers. I don't produce content regularly because I don't have anyone interested in seeing it on social media or watching it on YouTube. My life isn't consumed with reading and responding to comments. It's consumed with tutoring children and writing papers for school. With that small of a platform, I don't get much interaction online. Whatever interactions I do receive are usually lukewarm or entirely positive. Now, imagine if my platform balloons, to the point that I've attracted a few CHUDs to troll my social media accounts. Suddenly, I'll find myself becoming more defensive, more hypersensitive and maybe, even more erratic.
It can happen to anyone, folks. I've seen many of my favorite YouTubers starting out with a fairly small platform, critiquing bigger YouTubers and promising that they'd never do what those big YouTubers do. But I've noticed that rising fame does crazy shit to people's heads and egos. You can vow to retain your integrity all you want. But at some point, it's likely that you'll make at one least mistake. And don't think that the cancel mob is going to be particularly merciful about it, either. If Tatiana Westbrook can have a thousand holes punched into one particularly bad choice she made, who am I to think that I have the self-control to always react to my detractors with dignity on a particularly bad day?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending Dessen et al in any capacity. Her situation has merely afforded me an opportunity to reflect on how I want to conduct myself as a published author. If you look on Twitter, you'll see that a majority of my content is mostly harmless. (The real action is here in my blog!) I try my hardest to retain a squeaky clean image free of political statements and profanity on Twitter. Is it a method of selling out? Yes, but it's pragmatic. Even though authors should be free of censorship in their art, that doesn't mean that there isn't a professional relationship to maintain. I choose to maintain a clean, manageable reputation so that my future publishers will be proud to have my works on their roster. And of course, that all starts by not giving an author an opportunity to read a bad review. Because when you give an author an opportunity to read a bad review, she will get hurt. When she gets hurt, she'll tweet about it. And when she tweets about it, she'll rally together a mob to defend her. And when she rallies...oh, you know how When You Give a Mouse a Cookie ends, right? Right. So instead of reading reviews, I'll just stick to killing off my future trolls in my novels instead.
Indeed, I'm not going to post a play-by-play of the incident. Instead, I'd like to point out that this is exactly why I'm not reading reviews when I become published. Now, hold your rotten vegetables, hold your wigs and hold your outrage, please. In a few paragraphs, I'll pick a "side", if I have to, and defend my stance.
Authors know that mixed in among the scintillating praise for their works are a few steaming piles of excrement written for the sole purpose of being a total dick. It's true, some people get a rise out of dragging someone's precious work. That's the internet for ya! It's especially hard to avoid those nasty reviews because the sites that host them don't have a particularly strong toxicity filter. It's easy to enforce kindness and objectivity in a critique group, in which the reviewer must face the author in person. It's not as easy to enforce that when the reviewer can hide behind a computer screen and throw any kind of vitriol towards the author and their work, as long as it's not hate speech.
I know that there's a cadre of aspiring and even published authors out there who insist that you have to read your reviews. They'll argue that reviews toughen you, that you have to take the good with the bad, that you have to separate the gold from the dirt in order to become a better author. I dare to oppose that common platitude. Venomous reviews are more detrimental to the author than they are helpful, in my personal opinion. Sure, you'll get a bacteria-sized nugget of gold from them, if you dig really hard. But you'll get mud all over soul. Over time, those venomous reviews just siphon out your inspiration and your creativity.
But that's not the case here. Brooke Nelson, the student who critiqued Sarah Dessen, didn't say anything particularly vitriolic. Sure, her comment about Dessen’s work being good enough for teens, but not for a college reading list sounded a bit flippant. (If there's one thing you shouldn't do in the literary industry, it's that you shouldn't put down other genres, no matter how much you hate them.) But other than that, all she said was that she personally believed that Dessen's novel didn't belong in the Common Reads list. It's a perfectly valid opinion and she back it up masterfully.
As for any claims that Nelson's assessment was a misogynistic attack, I have to disagree. As a feminist myself, let me point out something simple. Claiming that you have to "support teh wimmenz" no matter what kind of content they produce: broke. Lauding authors who shed light on important issues: woke. Attacking another woman just because she didn't include many female authors in her list: white feminism. Seeing the greater point that said woman is trying to make about far greater pieces of literature about racial injustice being overlooked: intersectional AF.
I wonder if the authors who chimed in to attack Brooke Nelson thought about their approach. Did Sarah Dessen take a moment to reflect on what her friends were saying? (As of right now, she still hasn't apologized formally. That's not a bad thing, I'm just stating a fact for my readers to properly assess my blog post.) Because I look at Dessen's comment about "authors being human beings" and I look at all these friends of hers failing to apply that logic to Brooke Nelson. She's a human being, too. Where was the civilized human respect that she deserved just for a stating a harmless opinion?
Indeed, this debacle has only further cemented my decision to not read reviews. Now, I know what you're going to say. "But S.K., why don't you just ignore bad reviews or react civilly to people who critique you?" As of right now, I have a Twitter platform of 14 followers. I don't produce content regularly because I don't have anyone interested in seeing it on social media or watching it on YouTube. My life isn't consumed with reading and responding to comments. It's consumed with tutoring children and writing papers for school. With that small of a platform, I don't get much interaction online. Whatever interactions I do receive are usually lukewarm or entirely positive. Now, imagine if my platform balloons, to the point that I've attracted a few CHUDs to troll my social media accounts. Suddenly, I'll find myself becoming more defensive, more hypersensitive and maybe, even more erratic.
It can happen to anyone, folks. I've seen many of my favorite YouTubers starting out with a fairly small platform, critiquing bigger YouTubers and promising that they'd never do what those big YouTubers do. But I've noticed that rising fame does crazy shit to people's heads and egos. You can vow to retain your integrity all you want. But at some point, it's likely that you'll make at one least mistake. And don't think that the cancel mob is going to be particularly merciful about it, either. If Tatiana Westbrook can have a thousand holes punched into one particularly bad choice she made, who am I to think that I have the self-control to always react to my detractors with dignity on a particularly bad day?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending Dessen et al in any capacity. Her situation has merely afforded me an opportunity to reflect on how I want to conduct myself as a published author. If you look on Twitter, you'll see that a majority of my content is mostly harmless. (The real action is here in my blog!) I try my hardest to retain a squeaky clean image free of political statements and profanity on Twitter. Is it a method of selling out? Yes, but it's pragmatic. Even though authors should be free of censorship in their art, that doesn't mean that there isn't a professional relationship to maintain. I choose to maintain a clean, manageable reputation so that my future publishers will be proud to have my works on their roster. And of course, that all starts by not giving an author an opportunity to read a bad review. Because when you give an author an opportunity to read a bad review, she will get hurt. When she gets hurt, she'll tweet about it. And when she tweets about it, she'll rally together a mob to defend her. And when she rallies...oh, you know how When You Give a Mouse a Cookie ends, right? Right. So instead of reading reviews, I'll just stick to killing off my future trolls in my novels instead.
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