Thank You Notes – by cate kennedy

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I received a note from a writer friend the other day, expressing his gratitude for a quick email I’d sent to him praising his latest book.  Considering his stature and reputation, that gratitude surprised me a little, and made me realise how much all of us crave feedback from our peers, or from anybody, after we’ve written something and sent it out into the world, clutching its bus fare and little lunchbox, uncertain of how it will be received or welcomed.  How small and defenceless it suddenly seems! And where’s this great gush of protective anxiety coming from?

I remember chatting to another writer once who’d made the leap from comedy writing to performing stand-up himself.  We were sitting backstage at the time waiting for his bracket onstage and he’d just returned white-faced from the loos, shaking like a leaf.   “Why do you do this?” I said, “why put yourself through this kind of fear?”

“I got tired of never hearing any feedback,” he answered, “just slaving away by myself writing in my room, never knowing if it was funny or not.  Now, yeah, it’s like going to the gallows but at least when I make the joke I know straight away if my audience likes it or not.  And when I do hear the laughter, that’s the drug that makes me want to do it again.  I’ve traded isolation for instant gratification.”

If someone were to ask me the hardest thing about writing, I fear my answer would sound a bit petulant: ‘It’s the loneliness.’   Even when my day is going well I still miss, sometimes, the companionship of a job, any job – the chatting with work colleagues making coffees in the staff kitchen, the in-jokes, the breaks in the day that are to do with camaraderie and talk.  Alone in your room you write a line and there’s nobody to bounce the idea off; you worry that perhaps you are in danger of losing perspective, of becoming a crashing bore, of losing your touch.  That’ll be your story out there under the bright lights, delivering its hard-won routine, and nobody in the audience will get it.  It will stutter to a halt, lose their attention, stumble offstage to a chorus of slow claps, and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.   At times like this I understand my suffering friend, on tenterhooks before his name was called, going out there with his raw material to invite the heckling.  At least he’d know to do it differently next time, with that brutal feedback, and that’s his reward for bravery.

When you’re a writer, no such adjustments will be possible once your work is published, and any of you who have waited at this stage for a critical public response to trickle belatedly back to you will understand what tenterhooks are all about.  (Quick etymological check: couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor.  They’re the hooks used to stretch material taut as it dries.  That’s YOUR material we’re talking about.  Ink-damp, just created, pierced taut with hooks…)

Perhaps that’s why our faith in our editors sometimes must verge on the slightly fanatical, and why we’re so grateful when someone, especially someone we trust and admire, writes to tell us they got it, and they loved it.   It’s like an imagined burst of laughter, or a collective gasp of recognition, or a round of applause.  When it happens, we momentarily forget our isolation, and take a little grateful bow of relief.

The writer who wrote to me thanking me for my feedback granted me – and you now – another perfect metaphor.   “Writing a book” he wrote,  “is like doing a Mount Rushmore face:  hanging down the sandstone cliff with a chisel and a hammer, chip, chip and bloody chip, it goes on forever, you have no idea what the massive thing will look like seen from a distance.”

Chip, chip and bloody chip.  Sound familiar?  What am I fashioning here, what will it look like, why did I choose such hard, unyielding materials, why am I doing this?   Here’s a tidbit for you – 90% of Mount Rushmore was carved using dynamite – two million tons of solid granite had to be shifted before workers could put up the scaffolding and be lowered down to start the fine work – and even then most of it was with jackhammers.  It was a long, long time before they allowed themselves the luxury of the hammers and chisels.  By then, I imagine, they must have had a phenomenal respect for their raw material, for the mountain itself they were trying to clear even to begin.  And, like writing, it does seem to me that the true skill lies in this clearing and carving away, in the appreciation and creation of negative space.  A reader sees something thrown into plausible relief only because a writer has spent vast amounts of invisible time hanging down a cliff in a harness, hesitantly paring away what’s redundant.   Sometimes, as the Mount Rushmore workers found with the massive face of Jefferson, the almost-finished likeness develops cracks and fissures so bad it needs to be blasted off, and started again.  They must have felt sick, setting that dynamite, knowing how much work they were about to undo by depressing that lever.  Sick, but seeing what needed to be done.

No, writing’s not a job for the impatient, or anyone dependent on instant gratification.   And there’s such basic fear in losing your judgment when you’re up so close, chipping flints off, unable to step back for a crucial bigger perspective.  No wonder we’re grateful when someone gives us a distant thumbs-up, a line or two sent from far away, letting us know that what we’re doing seems worthwhile to them.  I’m not trying to mythologise the writing process here, just make a mental note to myself to write to more authors when I finish their novels or stories or poems, to not forget what a necessary part of the endless process of vulnerability and connection this is.

I have a letter from an elderly woman named Audrey who wrote to me a couple of years back to let me know that something I’d written had touched her deeply.  “I’m an old duck of 78,” she wrote in a lovely sloping hand, “but I’m going to try to stick around a few years longer to see what you write next.”

I have to tell you, that letter meant more to me than any reviews that book received at the time.  It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.  The perfect state to write in, if you ask me.   Audrey, pass me my hammer.

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