Adding a Grain of Salt

Posted on September 2, 2013 Updated on September 2, 2013

As writers, sometimes we find that we live and die by reviews. I have heard of some authors who receive a bad review and never write another word. If they do, they never release it to the public. Who wants to live like that? Not I, said the fly.

This brings me to this point of my warped thinking which often, unmistakable makes a good deal of sense. As a writer, author or blogger, you have to take each review with a grain of salt; even the good ones. I will tell you why.

As I was having dinner with a good friend, she told me she had read The Basement of Mr. McGee and mentioned she found a few things in it. I told her there are a few things in everything I write, I leave them in  intentionally. I don’t need it to be perfect, I need it to be good. I want my readers to see the growth in me with each work. If it is perfect, then I have nowhere to go and a mistake when you are on top, feels really painful. It is hard to get back up.

However, there are times, when there are no mistakes and everything is as it should be. However, there are still some people who will take fault.

80 of 113 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars The Triumph of Mediocrity, April 8, 2001
By A Customer
Where are the gatekeepers? There is absolutely nothing here that I haven’t read before, in the eighties, by other trendy young women writers. They put an Indian stamp on it, and it’s supposed to be profound? These stories had no ability to evoke character or emotion, the prose style was unremarkable, the structure color by numbers. There was not a surprise or a genuine moment anywhere. A real effort to pander to trendy tastes, though, with unconvincing depictions of adulterous affairs, and so forth. Nothing new here, except for the color of the characters’ skins.
Pretty harsh isn’t it. There are 26 other reviews very similar to this one favored with a single, solitary star. Others were kind and rated the work with two stars and a bit of advice.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars I like this book a lot less than everyone else does, February 15, 2012
The first story in this book is interesting. It’s about a couple who suffered through the horrible experience of having a stillborn baby, and this made the wife lose interest in her life and in her marriage. I was hoping for an upbeat, positive ending, but no, that’s not what this book is about. It’s about depressing endings. I kind of thought it would be.

Try for another baby, okay?

I read 3 or 4 more stories in the book, and nothing was positive about any of them. All right already. Life sucks. Thank you for telling me that. The last one I began to read opened up with a woman having an affair with a married man, and that about did it for me. I don’t want to suffer through any more of these depressing stories.

These reviews were written about The Interpreter of Maladies, a Pulitzer Prize winning work by Jhumpa Lahiri. It does not stop here. I found the same thing with The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. There are 46 one star reviews on this masterpiece about soldiers in the Viet Nam war. Even Jeffrey Deaver and Kurt Vonnegut received single star reviews.
You have to take some of these opinions with a grain of salt. Not everyone is going to like, love or get everything you write. If there are readers who feel that “The New York publishing cartel, the editors of the New Yorker magazine, and the Pulitzer Prize committee together run the risk of turning readers away from ethnic fiction if they continue to elevate unremarkable books like this above all others.”

If this is said about a Pulitzer Prize winning work, then adding a grain of salt to what people say about your works, will make swallowing their malarkey much easier. At the end of the day, write what you know. Write what you love and write because that is all you know how to do.

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