Silencing the Critics
By: Tonja Vallin
Tags: Authors, Cancer, Writers On Writing, Novel, Writing

Silencing the Critics

I wrote a 1 star novel….or so they said

Late last week I happen to stumble upon Good Reads and I was having an absolute fantastical time pulling up books I adore and giving them 5 star ratings. The Clockmaker’s Daughter — 5 star, The Help —5 star, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone — 5 star.

I even wrote a couple reviews. Then I had the idea to search for my own novel, I was sure it wouldn’t be listed in Good Reads. My heart skipped a beat. It was there!

And then my heart skipped another beat.

Someone had given my book, Cancer Free Emily a 1 star rating.

1 star.

Most of the time when I think about my first novel I get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. It took me 7 years to write. I had no idea what I was doing, it was started and stopped a dozen time. And then, like magic it was finally written, painstakingly edited and offered for sale on Amazon.

When I think about the book I feel a lot of emotion, happiness, pride, nostalgia, joy. Maybe a little of all four rolled into one.

So I was temporarily put back on my heels and felt this pain in my chest when I saw the 1 star review. I’ll be the first to admit that I never expected Brad Pitt to option the movie rights but who the hell was this ruthless sorry soul that thought my novel deserved a 1 star rating?

I was crushed.

This book was my baby. My first born novel. And giving it a 1 star rating was about like walking up to a new mother and throwing cold water in her sleeping baby’s face.

I was upset, irritated but mostly shocked that someone would take the time to read my 77,000 glorious words of details, plots and dialogue and conclude it all deserved a 1 star.

To be fair, it’s a free country. People are entitled to give their opinion but I had to wonder, did they really read the whole book?

Did they hate my cast of characters, Atlas, Emily, Collin and Cee Cee too? And if they did, what kind of person would hate those characters? Atlas in particular is hard to hate, the woman had healed from cancer three times! Could they not have at least given her a break and given it a 2 star? The whole 1 star gesture seemed awfully heartless to me.

Then I realized something and it made me feel infinitely better.

Readers are great, they are smart, well read and full of knowledge, but readers who go around handing out 1 star reviews are likely not writers. In fact, I have a new theory.

Mean readers are likely very, very bad writers.

Readers have no idea how painstakingly hard it is to write a novel. They sit up on their high horse as if they are better than others, and judge the writers who are like pigs, down in the mud sweating out the details of plot, setting the scenes, writing dialogue along with clever endings and attention grabbing openings.

Here’s the truth, writing a novel is hard and any reader who thinks it’s easy should write they’re own damn first novel.

Mean readers are like people who think they are a soldier because they played Fortnite, meanwhile the writers have been off to war in the trenches of plot and pace. Mean readers don’t know how much work it is, because 1) they’ve never done it and 2) If they did, they wouldn’t be such little asses.

I can’t even imagine giving a book a 1 star, even it was terrible, what good does that do to the first time novelist? What’s the point of crushing a soul, especially one that has spent their time not reading, not watching television or gaming, but writing a book so that you might have something tangible to enjoy.

It still bothers me, no one likes a 1 star review, but I’m not going to let one lone critic silence me. She can sit comfortably behind her computer screen berating novels all she wants, the reality is she’s speaking from a place of judgement and fear and writers are writing from a place of creativity and courage.

So here’s to you, dear writers. Keep writing on and don’t let the 1 star critics of the world get you down. For it’s not for the glory that we write, we write because the story needs to be told and we tell it because we’re the very best person to tell it.

Tonja is the author of Cancer Free Emily, (a 1 star novel) written for her mother Emily who healed from having Stage IV cancer to Cancer Free. She is a frequent contributor to Medium.