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Making a Macho Man Cry
One of the highlights of my writing career
Over the first twenty-some years of my fifty-plus year writing career I almost never let anyone read my writing. I did not write for readers but rather for the story. I wrote in order to flush stories out of my being. If I did not write I got constipated with stories — and that is not healthy.
Those first couple decades of writing were woefully lacking in feedback. But I did in fact get a teeny tiny bit of feedback. I can count the times on my hands. It was always when someone asked to read something. I never offered it to anyone. That tiny bit of feedback was always extremely negative.
Once it was mind-blowingly negative.
A girlfriend I had been dating for a couple of months asked me one day if she could read something I wrote. I was always talking about being a writer but I never asked her to read anything. What was up with that?
So I gave her the first two chapters of a novel I was working on at the time. I waited patiently and anxiously for her to read them. When she was done reading she threw the typewritten manuscript pages violently at my face then went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.
Now most people would consider that to be negative feedback, right? I did, at first. But the more I…
