Should a writer critique other writers harshly?

Seven years ago, I was a decade removed from leaving grad school after my M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing, the degree the straight English majors called “English Light” and M.F.A. students called the “M.F.A. Light.” I had thought, when I started the program at University of Illinois at Chicago back in fall of 2002, that I wanted to be both a critic and a writer. I left without becoming either.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see why. As a hybrid literature/writing student, I was too busy writing to do the research necessary to become much good at theory, and too busy reading 19th century texts or French theory to develop much at writing my own stories. At the time I finished my M.A., I’d hardly read anything written after 1980. I’d gotten nowhere as a writer of my own stories, and I felt dejected and wanted nothing to do with literature, either writing it or reading it. That feeling didn’t change for years after leaving graduate school to go get what I thought of as a “normal” job, something as far from literature as I could get.

 

Around the time I turned forty, I wondered if it might be worth trying to write stories again. Forty’s a good age to make sure you haven’t talked yourself out of something you really wanted to do with your life and see if you can still amend having done so. I didn’t try to go back for a Ph.D., because it was falling in love with stories that had originally made me go to grad school, not falling in love with theory. Instead, I simply started to read stories that had been written in my lifetime.

 

It didn’t change much for me right away. I was writing again, but those first stories I sent out at forty all got rejected, the same as they had at twenty-five. Still, something felt different. Even in failure, I could feel something changing in my work. Melville is wonderful, and Moby Dick will remain my favorite book until I die, but there’s something about reading people who speak in your own idiom that really works on the literary imagination. 

Encouraged by the change, certain I would soon find the secret sauce and become famous, and unaware that even back in 2013 nobody really blogged anymore, I started this blog about my attempt to figure it all out in my forties. I thought of it as a service to future generations, who would be able to follow my aesthetic development journey just before I started winning awards. 

I started to get some stories published here and there, but I wasn’t famous. I was better, but not great. This blog, which almost nobody read, occasionally went from sprightly to morose; my life seemed a waste. 

On the way to becoming I writer, I accidentally become a critic

At some point, I decided to start blogging serious analysis, or at least my best attempts at serious analysis, of the best contemporary short stories. I focused on the big anthologies: Best American Short Stories, O.Henry, and Pushcart. I didn’t write about every story in the anthologies, but I wrote about a lot of them. My purpose wasn’t to revive the lost hope of being a serious critic. Although the work I did was influenced by all the theory I’d been exposed to, my primary purpose wasn’t academic. Mostly, I just wanted an exercise that would force me to focus closely on the best fiction being written today so it would influence my own work for the better. I’ve described my approach as close to a sermon, with short stories as my secular text. It’s a little bit of theory, a little bit of the eye of a developing writer noticing techniques, but by and large, it’s just me trying to become a better person through reading. What I’ve enjoyed most about this is how it’s reminded me that becoming a fuller, better human being is why I enjoy literature, why I want to write stories of my own.

 

I never expected people would read these literary sermons. My blog was always an obscure backwater town of the internet, with at most a few hundred hits a month, probably half of which came from bots. Yet within a few months of starting to blog about short stories, the numbers started going up. Today, about two years after I started critiquing other work regularly, I get over 5,000 hits a month. That’s not much, of course, certainly not enough to say I’ve emerged from obscurity. There are YouTubers who get 5 million views without breaking a sweat. It was a big change for me, though. It meant there were some people out there reading me of their own free will. 

The reason people are finding my blog is a troubling sign for literature

The posts I write analyzing short stories get about twenty times as many hits as the posts about writing, or other subjects. Those finding my blog seem to mostly be students who are studying short stories in school, especially Best American Short Stories, based on the spikes in readers that coincide with school years. College students (or, in some cases, senior groups, as I’ve discovered because they’ve reached out to me) read a story, feel they don’t quite grasp it or just want to see what others think about it, so they Google it, and my blog pops up. 

But why on Earth should my blog pop up? These are the best short stories being written, or at least the ones that got the most attention, so surely, there are highly regarded, perspicacious critics out there writing far more insightful things about them than I am, right? 

Turns out, no. A few stories, the ones that were originally published in The New Yorker, say, have a professional reading students can turn to, but for the most part, students are going to find either my blog or that of Karen Carlson, who has become my friend over the last few years as we’ve conferred with one another while writing about the same stories. 

 

For the most part, the two of us are what’s out there when students are looking for help with reading challenging stories. How is it possible there are so few critics of short stories out there? If you watch a movie that captivates you, or hear a song with lyrics you keep chewing on but aren’t quite sure you understand, you can find hundreds of places on the internet to help you. There are thriving communities that discuss these things. There are YouTubers—some of them really excellent—who make a living through an informal intellectual approach they cultivated to art. It’s very helpful stuff for people who want to go a little deeper with art they've enjoyed, and I’m glad it’s there, but nobody is really talking about literature in this way, especially short stories. That’s why people find me. That can’t be good for the future of the short story as a living art form. 

I think fear of revenge keeps a lot of would-be critics from speaking up, for fear of what it would do to their own place within the writing community. 

The readers are the reason for the lack of critics

It’s an open secret that the main readers of short stories are other writers. Many journals stay in business now more from fees they charge writers to submit work than they do from subscriptions. David Olimpo, editor-in-chief of The Atticus Review, said as much in one of his recent newsletters:

“I've written before that I think the value proposition for literary magazines is not what most editors and writers might like it to be. Ideally, we'd love the general public to be chomping at the bit to subscribe to our literary magazines, and to pay for the great content we're providing! But that's not the reality of our culture, or the oversaturated media landscape we are a part of. In my opinion, the value proposition today for literary magazines is in...not being a literary magazine. It's in developing relationships with writers, who are also readers. This is why platforms such as Medium have been so successful: they realize the writer is both client and audience.”

He went on to announce that Atticus would be raising fees for submissions to $5, and not apologizing for it. He felt writers should be “glad to pay it.” Whether you agree with him or not isn’t the point; the point is that editors clearly realize their audience is writers, not bankers and stock clerks and actuaries and lawyers and nurses and morticians looking for an enjoyable way to expand their minds and souls during their free time. 

Writers nowadays are coached to be good “literary citizens.” We need to be encouraging one another, say nice things about each other on social media, help one another to promote our work, write pithy blurbs for the backs of one another’s books. Part of being a writer now includes writing puff-piece reviews that look like real critique but aren’t. 

That’s all fine. I am not advocating we return to some golden age of writing when the giants feuded with one another and wrote scathing reviews of the work of their enemies. I’ve done a few soft reviews for friends, too. Without at least some critique with teeth, though, critique where the reviews might be bad, there’s not much of a thriving community. The problem for short stories, though, is that they’re mostly supported by people whose culture forbids them from providing critique with an element of danger in it. The main readers of short stories are other writers, making other writers the ones primarily in the position to provide the necessary critique to rebuild a real public appetite for short stories, but other writers are exactly the people who cannot write them, because it could be social and commercial suicide. Which means there are few readers of short stories in a social position to provide serious critique. This ensures that short stories remain an insular art form, one that discourages outsiders from delving into it, because there is no critical framework to help outsiders overcome initial hurdles to understanding.

While my obscure little blog has been picking up a small audience, I’ve also slowly been becoming a “real writer.” I had a book of short stories published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2017. (See the link to the right! Buy to support the publisher and me! Hit like and subscribe! Donate to my Patreon!) Last month, I won the Robert Day Award for Fiction from New Letters. I’m not Best-American-Short-Stories famous, but I am a member of the community of writers. It made me pause last month when I won the award to ask myself, “Am I enough of a real writer now I should quit writing critiques of other writers’ work?” What if my blog went from 5,000 readers a month to 50,000? What if  lightning struck and I got published in The New Yorker, and suddenly everyone cared about all the criticism I’ve written about the work of other writers?

 

I probably should stop. A writing mentor, if I looked for such things, would tell me I not only should stop writing critique of other writers, I should also delete everything I’ve done so far. Sometimes, I write things that would wreck my writer social credit score. Two years ago, I didn’t like Weike Wang’s “Omakase,” although others apparently loved it so much they put it in both the Best American and O.Henry anthologies, and two of the three O.Henry editors said it was their favorite. (If you Google the story at this minute, my blog is the third result you’ll get for it, meaning the few people who looked for an analysis of it likely landed on my negative one. I’m being serious when I say nobody is seriously looking at short fiction, at least not in a place an ordinary person could easily find it.)

 

Knowing what I know now of the dearth of criticism, I can’t stop. The people who find my blog are those mythical real readers we all wish we could find as writers, the ones headed into careers in things other than literature. They’re people who might be reading the only modern short stories they will ever read as adults, and they are stumbling onto my blog or Karen's, because they're almost all that exists. That is just an incredible shame, but it’s also a call to responsibility for me.

I have an ethics about it. I don’t tag writers when I Tweet out my latest analysis if I didn’t like their story. (In fact, I don’t Tweet these at all. I just post them sadly and move on with my day.) I don’t take any joy in disliking a story. I know I’m talking bad about somebody’s baby. But without somebody writing criticism, even informal criticism like my own not primarily aimed at a scholarly audience, where there is a chance of saying something negative, the positive analysis means nothing. It’s all just blurbs and striving for new ways to say things like “spell-binding” and “captivating.” I like to think that when I tag a writer to say I loved their work, and I hear back from them that they really appreciated someone taking their story seriously enough to write about it the way I have, part of the reason they appreciate it is because they know I mean it. This is especially true when I analyze stories from Pushcart, which tends to have fewer big names and more people like me, people just writing what they love because they can’t help themselves. I’m often the only person who responded to their story with written thoughts of my own. 

 

That’s why in early November, when Best American Short Stories drops (on Election Day, no less), I’ll be putting other things to the side for a few weeks to read, to think, to meditate, and to respond to the stories. My critical work is imperfect, and the people who are looking for answers deserve better than me, but until that exists, I’m going to try to keep giving it to them. Turning my back on that responsibility because I fear the momentary harm it might cause to my place in the literary world is the surest way to damn that world to an increasingly shrinking role.