Writing to possible or impossible audiences
June 29, 2023 9:51 AM Subscribe
"Writing for the Bad Faith Reader" by Susie Dumond (Mar 30, 2023) discusses how easy is is for writers today to get discouraged or preoccupied by the potential reactions of "the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making" (quoting Melissa Febos). Dumond shares "some of the ways I avoid writing for the bad faith reader these days." Her advice to write the first draft for yourself as a way to channel the "best faith" reader, and to accept that your work is not for every reader, reminds me of two of the five laws of library science: "to every book their reader" and "to every reader their book".
I've been writing online professionally in one way or another for 24 years, mostly on tech topics. I wish there was some way to avoid the Bad Faith Reader doing that, but there really isn't.
I feel like it's made my writing better and worse at the same time, and I hope it's made me a better and kinder reader / commenter.
Despite all the bad faith readings of what I've written over the years, somehow I still feel compelled to write (and publish) even when it's not part of my day job. I'd rather risk a bad faith reader than none at all, at least when I get a bad faith comment I know somebody has read it!
I have perfected my response for those, though. "Thank you, I'll give your comments the consideration they deserve."
posted by jzb at 11:52 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
I feel like it's made my writing better and worse at the same time, and I hope it's made me a better and kinder reader / commenter.
Despite all the bad faith readings of what I've written over the years, somehow I still feel compelled to write (and publish) even when it's not part of my day job. I'd rather risk a bad faith reader than none at all, at least when I get a bad faith comment I know somebody has read it!
I have perfected my response for those, though. "Thank you, I'll give your comments the consideration they deserve."
posted by jzb at 11:52 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
I struggle with this too. I'm always trying to anticipate objections by the pedantic or bad faith reader, or visualizing a 2-star Goodreads review listing my story's shortcomings. Obviously shackling one's creative engine this way is not a good thing, but it's hard to not imagine it and after that point the nagging thought becomes invasive.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:18 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:18 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
This reminds me so much of a prior discussion--which naturally I cannot find now--about writers worrying over the attack surfaces of their writing. (Is that the right phrase? Maybe I'm misremembering. But it had a military sound like that.) The notion that there are readers who are only reading to find problems they can gripe about online, is so strange and alien and yet so self-evidently true. "I just found it...PROBLEMATIC."
It sounds like a terrible way to read. I can manage hate-watching a show for a little while--when I'm grumpy and I know I'm not going to connect to it and I just feel like demolishing some small part of the world--but to read a whole book, a whole book, just so you can rush out and explain how offended you are? (And it's fun to flatten this person--who may just be grumpy today!--into an archetype, an army, a shadow looking over your shoulder.)
It is definitely a terrible way to write. It results--as Countess Elena puts it--in correct fiction, with none of the vibrant messiness and terribleness and ambiguity of the best fiction. I don't understand how so many people find it so comforting. I mean, I love comfort! I dislike discomfort! But comfort in reading so often comes from recognition, and when a character is (here's that word again) problematic, so often we get that thrill of recognition, aha, here's someone JUST AS AWFUL AS ME! What a thing to lose!
(And let me spiral out of control for a second, since queer writing came up in the piece, and say that the bad faith readers, and the demand for niceness, are a closeting mechanism so that straight readers can congratulate themselves on their tolerance and experience the light thrill of otherness-voyeurism, without having to actually think about our gross old weird bodies and the things they do together. They prefer the dry plastic clicking of two Ken dolls being pressed together, and grow angry when that fantasy is interrupted.)
posted by mittens at 12:24 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]
It sounds like a terrible way to read. I can manage hate-watching a show for a little while--when I'm grumpy and I know I'm not going to connect to it and I just feel like demolishing some small part of the world--but to read a whole book, a whole book, just so you can rush out and explain how offended you are? (And it's fun to flatten this person--who may just be grumpy today!--into an archetype, an army, a shadow looking over your shoulder.)
It is definitely a terrible way to write. It results--as Countess Elena puts it--in correct fiction, with none of the vibrant messiness and terribleness and ambiguity of the best fiction. I don't understand how so many people find it so comforting. I mean, I love comfort! I dislike discomfort! But comfort in reading so often comes from recognition, and when a character is (here's that word again) problematic, so often we get that thrill of recognition, aha, here's someone JUST AS AWFUL AS ME! What a thing to lose!
(And let me spiral out of control for a second, since queer writing came up in the piece, and say that the bad faith readers, and the demand for niceness, are a closeting mechanism so that straight readers can congratulate themselves on their tolerance and experience the light thrill of otherness-voyeurism, without having to actually think about our gross old weird bodies and the things they do together. They prefer the dry plastic clicking of two Ken dolls being pressed together, and grow angry when that fantasy is interrupted.)
posted by mittens at 12:24 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]
What’s a bad faith reader? It’s someone who, rather than approaching a book openly, looks for things to hate or criticize.
I agree that there is such a thing as a bad faith reader, but I think this definition is subtly wrong. A bad faith reader is someone who is not making a sincere effort to interpret a work fairly, usually in order to jam an aspect of it into some broader theory. I guess in pop culture this usually plays out in a negative way, but honestly a fair amount of modern literary criticism reads this way to me as well. A wholly negative reading can be entirely in good faith, and a generally positive one can be in bad faith.
Anyway, it's rather quaint to see a relatively new writer only discovering that people may not like her work and may say so in a way that doesn't make her feel great when she hears about it, rather than discovering the horrendous power of the pile-on that transcends the online world (which, by the way, may be driven by a lot of people reading in good faith who are just kind of dumb or immature or thoughtless!) (see Isabel Fall).
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
I agree that there is such a thing as a bad faith reader, but I think this definition is subtly wrong. A bad faith reader is someone who is not making a sincere effort to interpret a work fairly, usually in order to jam an aspect of it into some broader theory. I guess in pop culture this usually plays out in a negative way, but honestly a fair amount of modern literary criticism reads this way to me as well. A wholly negative reading can be entirely in good faith, and a generally positive one can be in bad faith.
Anyway, it's rather quaint to see a relatively new writer only discovering that people may not like her work and may say so in a way that doesn't make her feel great when she hears about it, rather than discovering the horrendous power of the pile-on that transcends the online world (which, by the way, may be driven by a lot of people reading in good faith who are just kind of dumb or immature or thoughtless!) (see Isabel Fall).
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
mittens, the earlier discussion about writers trying to minimize the "attack surface" of their writing was this one.
A few weeks ago I wrote, "I wonder how much of my anxiety about writing is just another kind of social anxiety - the (wrong, but unkillable) belief that I can, if I try hard enough, avoid making anyone mad at me. If I leave Twitter forever and never hear another word of Book Twitter Discourse, will it get better? Even if it will, can I convince myself to do it?"
But when I thought about it more, I realized that my problem wasn't the bad faith reader. The problem is the thousands of mutually contradictory ideas about what good fiction is and what good fiction should do. When I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to advance social justice, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to be complex, challenging, beautifully crafted literature, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when half of Speculative Fiction Twitter gets in a fight with the other half of Speculative Fiction Twitter I think there's some tiny-eyed needle I can try to thread and not make either half mad at me, and -
Without particularly realizing I was doing it, and without particularly being scared of bad-faith readers, I've started aiming at targets that literally nobody can hit.
And ambition is a good thing, but it can also make the perfect the enemy of the good, tie you up in knots, make you too uptight and scared to do the bad first draft that's necessary for the good tenth draft.
It's so easy, as a writer, to spend way too much time thinking about all the different ways in which people will like you or hate you. And that's true with or without bad faith readers.
I'm doing better these days, although I'm afraid that by saying so I'll jinx it. I am working on being more loose and more sloppy, not as an abandonment of ambition but because I want to give real art a chance to emerge from wild messiness and not a fussy anxious death-grip on what I write and how I am perceived. I am working on acknowledging to myself that even if I think that Brandon Taylor is an excellent writer who gives lots of very good writing advice (I do! He is!) there is not really much point in trying to figure out how to write a novel that he would approve of, when what I really need to do is figure out how to write a novel that I would approve of.
posted by Jeanne at 1:31 PM on June 29, 2023 [12 favorites]
A few weeks ago I wrote, "I wonder how much of my anxiety about writing is just another kind of social anxiety - the (wrong, but unkillable) belief that I can, if I try hard enough, avoid making anyone mad at me. If I leave Twitter forever and never hear another word of Book Twitter Discourse, will it get better? Even if it will, can I convince myself to do it?"
But when I thought about it more, I realized that my problem wasn't the bad faith reader. The problem is the thousands of mutually contradictory ideas about what good fiction is and what good fiction should do. When I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to advance social justice, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to be complex, challenging, beautifully crafted literature, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when half of Speculative Fiction Twitter gets in a fight with the other half of Speculative Fiction Twitter I think there's some tiny-eyed needle I can try to thread and not make either half mad at me, and -
Without particularly realizing I was doing it, and without particularly being scared of bad-faith readers, I've started aiming at targets that literally nobody can hit.
And ambition is a good thing, but it can also make the perfect the enemy of the good, tie you up in knots, make you too uptight and scared to do the bad first draft that's necessary for the good tenth draft.
It's so easy, as a writer, to spend way too much time thinking about all the different ways in which people will like you or hate you. And that's true with or without bad faith readers.
I'm doing better these days, although I'm afraid that by saying so I'll jinx it. I am working on being more loose and more sloppy, not as an abandonment of ambition but because I want to give real art a chance to emerge from wild messiness and not a fussy anxious death-grip on what I write and how I am perceived. I am working on acknowledging to myself that even if I think that Brandon Taylor is an excellent writer who gives lots of very good writing advice (I do! He is!) there is not really much point in trying to figure out how to write a novel that he would approve of, when what I really need to do is figure out how to write a novel that I would approve of.
posted by Jeanne at 1:31 PM on June 29, 2023 [12 favorites]
The problem is the thousands of mutually contradictory ideas about what good fiction is and what good fiction should do. When I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to advance social justice, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to be complex, challenging, beautifully crafted literature, I think, "Yes, I should do that!"
It's worth remembering that James Baldwin and Richard Wright never reconciled after Baldwin's critique of Native Son in "Everybody's Protest Novel." In this fallen world, some worthwhile aims remain in fundamental tension. People pretending that writing a book with an absolutely pure underlying ideology and perfect technique is a solved problem are the issue here, not the writers out there trying.
posted by praemunire at 2:33 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's worth remembering that James Baldwin and Richard Wright never reconciled after Baldwin's critique of Native Son in "Everybody's Protest Novel." In this fallen world, some worthwhile aims remain in fundamental tension. People pretending that writing a book with an absolutely pure underlying ideology and perfect technique is a solved problem are the issue here, not the writers out there trying.
posted by praemunire at 2:33 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'm really sympathetic to the idea that writers are getting it from idiot readers more interested in the culture war and in tearing down others to built their own clout than in sincerely engaging with art that discomforts them, but this article defines 'bad faith' way too broadly. Like anyone who doesn't come to a book looking to enjoy it is a 'bad faith reader' and a hater and you should ignore them.
Yes, I enjoy authors who ignore their critics, but no, not every critic is a hater / bad faith reader.
posted by subdee at 2:36 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yes, I enjoy authors who ignore their critics, but no, not every critic is a hater / bad faith reader.
posted by subdee at 2:36 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
This resonates with me. My fiction publishing "career" went from 1982 to 2008 and included 10 novels and at least 50 shorter fiction works. It was genre stuff and I wrote to market because I grandiosely wanted recognition and acceptance more than the personal satisfaction and nourishment I get from writing from the heart and being true to myself. I readily acknowledge that my output was mediocre at best. I finally had a come-to-Jesus moment when I realized that a person very close to me flat-out lied when they said they'd read one of my books.
Until then I had endured the routine trashing and belittling that goes with the territory, but I decided on the spot to chuck it all. I commit fiction every single day but I write for an audience of one-- myself. I can't begin to describe the feeling of freedom and release this gives me. I get to do what I love most without answering to anyone. I'm free of the agents and editors, and empty bookstores, and "disappointing" sales reports, not to mention online reviews and discussion groups full of trolls. I feel very lucky and blessed.
posted by charris5005 at 2:48 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]
Until then I had endured the routine trashing and belittling that goes with the territory, but I decided on the spot to chuck it all. I commit fiction every single day but I write for an audience of one-- myself. I can't begin to describe the feeling of freedom and release this gives me. I get to do what I love most without answering to anyone. I'm free of the agents and editors, and empty bookstores, and "disappointing" sales reports, not to mention online reviews and discussion groups full of trolls. I feel very lucky and blessed.
posted by charris5005 at 2:48 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]
I'm not sure if all the demand for nicey nice fiction is the result of straights wanting to take a tour of the literary gay village--a lot of it seems to come from readers who, were they straight, would be reading Amish romances or something of that ilk. Enough people are outside of the 100 percent heterosexual community now that prudes can find representation, too.
posted by kingdead at 6:47 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by kingdead at 6:47 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Jeanne wrote:
Genuinely, completely seriously, one can't please everyone. The phrase "you can't please everyone" has often been misused to support the speaker's desire to avoid having to do whatever work is necessary to fulfill someone's reasonable request. But, regardless, it is still actually true!
posted by brainwane at 4:50 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
The problem is the thousands of mutually contradictory ideas about what good fiction is and what good fiction should do. When I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to advance social justice, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when I read an essay about what fiction needs in order to be complex, challenging, beautifully crafted literature, I think, "Yes, I should do that!" and when half of Speculative Fiction Twitter gets in a fight with the other half of Speculative Fiction Twitter I think there's some tiny-eyed needle I can try to thread and not make either half mad at me, and -Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.
Without particularly realizing I was doing it, and without particularly being scared of bad-faith readers, I've started aiming at targets that literally nobody can hit.
Genuinely, completely seriously, one can't please everyone. The phrase "you can't please everyone" has often been misused to support the speaker's desire to avoid having to do whatever work is necessary to fulfill someone's reasonable request. But, regardless, it is still actually true!
posted by brainwane at 4:50 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
Not every book is for every reader. That sentiment changed the way I read other people’s work, it changed the way I review books, and it changed the way I write.
This has helped me a lot on social media as well. While I'm aware of context collapse and know that people will be reading my words outside my intended audience, it's also okay to just say "Well maybe that toot/post/picture wasn't FOR you" and kind of psychically move on from that person. In reality it's harder than that a lot of the time because I think part of the issue with this article's idea of a "bad faith reader" is that maybe you could win them over somehow or at least have them see things from your perspective if you sincerely engaged with their critique.
But then I think about praemunire's definition "A bad faith reader is someone who is not making a sincere effort to interpret a work fairly" and I feel that sincerely engaging with someone who is not sincerely engaging with you is probably a mistake. While I think it's fine to say "This is a lens through which I evaluated this and it did not work for me" I think that's different from saying "This is a bad piece of writing" and I think a lot of people making critiques are not good at differentiating what didn't work for them and what they think won't work for ANYone.
Also love the nod to Ranganathan. His work guides a lot of my own.
posted by jessamyn at 12:48 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
This has helped me a lot on social media as well. While I'm aware of context collapse and know that people will be reading my words outside my intended audience, it's also okay to just say "Well maybe that toot/post/picture wasn't FOR you" and kind of psychically move on from that person. In reality it's harder than that a lot of the time because I think part of the issue with this article's idea of a "bad faith reader" is that maybe you could win them over somehow or at least have them see things from your perspective if you sincerely engaged with their critique.
But then I think about praemunire's definition "A bad faith reader is someone who is not making a sincere effort to interpret a work fairly" and I feel that sincerely engaging with someone who is not sincerely engaging with you is probably a mistake. While I think it's fine to say "This is a lens through which I evaluated this and it did not work for me" I think that's different from saying "This is a bad piece of writing" and I think a lot of people making critiques are not good at differentiating what didn't work for them and what they think won't work for ANYone.
Also love the nod to Ranganathan. His work guides a lot of my own.
posted by jessamyn at 12:48 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]
A few years ago I was reflecting on how acceptance is not the same as resignation.
I had been talking with a friend, many months previous, and race stuff came up, and the desire to not screw up, and the desire to not be perceived as screwing up. And one thing he said was that he doesn't want anyone to hate him.
And I found myself articulating something that I don't know whether I had before, which is: the optimal number of people who hate you is not zero, and if you aim for zero, you will never have that expectation met.
There will be good and bad things that happen to you that you do not in any way deserve (and "deserve" is a pretty dangerous word to let oneself use anyway along with "somehow" and "normal"). And so, sometimes, other people will be angry at you or hate you, and sometimes it's because of a specific thing you did, or because of your inherited unearned privilege or your position of power in an organization, and sometimes it's kind of out of nowhere because people get mad sometimes.
I think I have to be okay with the fact that, out of the 8 billion people on Earth, some of them kind of hate me. And then if I run into it, it's not a catastrophic surprise. It feels bad but I can have a bit of a windshield about it so the mud doesn't all get right on my face.
Like Amandine Lee, I want to fine-tune my fear response so that it serves me better, and part of that is accepting that nonzero rate of criticism.
That acceptance can be used as cover for entirely disregarding pushback -- a purity binary, a false dichotomy. I don't want to do that. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. I want to instead believe, and act as though, the error rate is nonzero, and will always be nonzero, but I can push to drive it asymptotically closer to zero.
But also I am kind of okay with the fact that, even on a day when I've lived my values, someone may lob an unfair criticism at me, or even hate me. Not all the way okay. But kind of okay with it, and aiming to be more okay with it.
Which for me is all tied up with, like, self-trust, emotional security, and a belief in the idea that I am fundamentally okay and can also change my mind about things in the future, that there is going to be a future, and so on. And that since I believe in, to quote the Unitarian Universalist principles, "the inherent worth and dignity of every person" .... that includes me, now and after I learn whatever I learn next.
posted by brainwane at 11:07 AM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
I had been talking with a friend, many months previous, and race stuff came up, and the desire to not screw up, and the desire to not be perceived as screwing up. And one thing he said was that he doesn't want anyone to hate him.
And I found myself articulating something that I don't know whether I had before, which is: the optimal number of people who hate you is not zero, and if you aim for zero, you will never have that expectation met.
There will be good and bad things that happen to you that you do not in any way deserve (and "deserve" is a pretty dangerous word to let oneself use anyway along with "somehow" and "normal"). And so, sometimes, other people will be angry at you or hate you, and sometimes it's because of a specific thing you did, or because of your inherited unearned privilege or your position of power in an organization, and sometimes it's kind of out of nowhere because people get mad sometimes.
I think I have to be okay with the fact that, out of the 8 billion people on Earth, some of them kind of hate me. And then if I run into it, it's not a catastrophic surprise. It feels bad but I can have a bit of a windshield about it so the mud doesn't all get right on my face.
Like Amandine Lee, I want to fine-tune my fear response so that it serves me better, and part of that is accepting that nonzero rate of criticism.
That acceptance can be used as cover for entirely disregarding pushback -- a purity binary, a false dichotomy. I don't want to do that. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. I want to instead believe, and act as though, the error rate is nonzero, and will always be nonzero, but I can push to drive it asymptotically closer to zero.
But also I am kind of okay with the fact that, even on a day when I've lived my values, someone may lob an unfair criticism at me, or even hate me. Not all the way okay. But kind of okay with it, and aiming to be more okay with it.
Which for me is all tied up with, like, self-trust, emotional security, and a belief in the idea that I am fundamentally okay and can also change my mind about things in the future, that there is going to be a future, and so on. And that since I believe in, to quote the Unitarian Universalist principles, "the inherent worth and dignity of every person" .... that includes me, now and after I learn whatever I learn next.
posted by brainwane at 11:07 AM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]
Without particularly realizing I was doing it, and without particularly being scared of bad-faith readers, I've started aiming at targets that literally nobody can hit.
And I found myself articulating something that I don't know whether I had before, which is: the optimal number of people who hate you is not zero, and if you aim for zero, you will never have that expectation met.
Both of these observations remind me of something that one of my screenwriting professors said once, that has really stuck with me:
"If you make something that nobody hates, nobody will love it."
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:36 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
And I found myself articulating something that I don't know whether I had before, which is: the optimal number of people who hate you is not zero, and if you aim for zero, you will never have that expectation met.
Both of these observations remind me of something that one of my screenwriting professors said once, that has really stuck with me:
"If you make something that nobody hates, nobody will love it."
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:36 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
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There's a book I'm reading right now that this reminds me of. I won't name it, partly because I don't want to argue about it, and partly because I don't dislike it. In fact, I've been drawn in well enough to keep reading. It's a queer romance with plenty of fantasy worldbuilding, a mystery, a lot going on, and I should have loved it right away. The thing is, it's just so ... correct. The good people believe good things and the bad people believe bad things. There's gray areas here and there, but that's the shape of it. You can tell by their appearance, too -- although not by disabilities or by shabby dress, because that would be wrong.
Still, I'm tired of returning library books without getting around to them, so I am doing my best to read in good faith.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:44 AM on June 29, 2023 [9 favorites]