Weird Feedback We Get—Ep.11 of Intentionally Blank

[Music] hey so um i really love this podcast but there's a there's a lot of problems that i have and you're going to hear about them oh that's a not that great a podcast title dan no that's not i mean it is it is kind of modeling have you seen these uh japanese like novels that the way they're titling these things oh yeah light novels like they're half title yeah the the title is something like i had eggs for breakfast and now suddenly my boyfriend hates me because they have come to life in my ears um right like they're very descriptive yes but they're very long so maybe that podcast title will work for maybe that podcast title will work what are we what are we going to be complaining about today well i think it would be a good idea to complain about the weird feedback that authors tend to get and i want to say up front because the reason i've been thinking about this is uh mutual friend of ours uh charlie holmberg ah charlie she sometimes shares with me the super obnoxious emails that she gets and i strongly suspect and wholeheartedly believe that uh women authors get a lot more of this kind of garbage than men do i agree with you having seen just a little bit of how it goes uh but also i do think it is the genre you're writing in uh does influence it also i think that if you're writing lots of romance you get different feedback than if you're not yeah so charlie does write uh romantic fiction quite a bit into you know i mean it's a sci-fi fantasy but often a strong romance through line um but yeah i i can definitely say that uh the y a stuff that i write gets a lot more of this unwanted constructive feedback than the thrillers explain what you mean by that unwanted constructive feedback and so this has been a long and ongoing kind of quandary for me because there is a big part of me that genuinely doesn't care what people think of my books right right like i am writing them for myself you clearly liked it enough to buy it uh we have both benefited from this i don't need to hear about all the things you disliked uh and i have seen authors i remember several years ago there was an author who was like that's crazy we need to have good customer service as authors we need to respond to our reviews um i don't believe that that's true you've got an interesting perspective on this i want to hear more my perspective is slightly different but more conventional okay so continue yeah and so i mean there's i i understand that anything i am putting out into the world is inviting a response right yeah that's the reason that i haven't used facebook in like four years because anything i say there people are going to respond to and then i'm going to be in a conversation i don't want to be in a conversation i just want to say stuff which is why twitter works a little better for me um although that's still clearly there's the possibility of response but it's less of a conversational format um and books yeah i i mean it people will send emails and say oh well here's all the proofing errors i found or here you're you're misusing this word or you got this technology wrong you um the way you kind of pitched us the beginning when we were talking before the episode started was you said the phrase i really love your books but here is everything i hate about them yeah so it's the emails you get that are one line of i love your works followed by 20 lines of what i don't like about them uh which is interesting and is that kind that's kind of that's kind of what i'm talking about yeah the uh you're not talking about the hate mail no if someone just genuinely hates it then they are welcome to hate it and that's fine and i can you know i don't know why you would tag me in your hate-filled review or why you would email it to me directly uh that's just kind of a that's jerky thing to do uh but you're welcome to go off on your own amongst your friends and family and hate it as vocally as you want that's what it's for uh but the ones that blow my mind are the ones that that do have that kind of 80 20 balance of this is great this is wonderful five stars but let me lay into it for all these other reasons relates a little bit to what we talked about last time the whole perfect um narrative thing so where i differ from you and what you have said um is i don't write for myself okay uh so if i wrote for myself i wouldn't release the books um and i can say that with confidence because i do not need the money from the books in order to uh survive right um the the books my books have made me financially independent and my investments are such that i never have to write another word um ever yeah and uh but um i am a storyteller i don't storytell without an audience i am not really interested in talking to an empty room and i do think that i would i've often said before i would be writing my stories if nobody read them but my friends and family mm-hmm but if no one were reading my stories at all i don't know if i would yeah maybe i would well and i i don't think that we disagree on that even in your description you're still writing because you love it there's still definitely an an amount of or a degree of self-interest in there of this is what i love to do and this is what i'm going to do you choose your topics because you like them you definitely and so do i craft them in such a way that other people ideally will like them as well uh but there's a reason you're writing epic fantasy instead of like motorcycle repair manuals yes absolutely and i do 100 love writing i mean i've talked before this is another repeat from my class but one of the biggest most important moments to my career was when i decided to stop caring whether the books um were going to be get puffed up or stop caring's the wrong term uh stop like i had a moment later in my unpublished career where i was getting lots of rejections and the time was ticking down right i had one year left in my master's degree i had picked a master's degree as the delaying tactic not because i could do anything with it and the first day i went to my master's degree the professor got up this was lance i don't know if you know lance uh larson uh laureate of utah for um for many years i don't think he is currently they rotate that title every five years or so but um was an excellent teacher um and um still at byu and if you get a chance to take a class from lance you should uh because he really knows his stuff um about poetry uh he and i would go to the rounds sometimes about what the best epic fantasy was because he did think it was a hundred years of solitude hearkening back to life okay um but regardless um lance was then the graduate student advisor he got up and he said here's all the stuff you're gonna need to do in order to become a professor of english and he listed it all off and it was like you know be on these journals do all of this research become an assistant to this to a professor make sure you know you're doing all this stuff and i realized i can't do any of that and still write books and so i knew my graduate program was not a path to becoming a professor um and i focused on my storytelling but then a year in tons of rejections i had tried for a few years to write like george martin do you were you there when i um when i hit up who was it it was uh editor at del rey i want to say it was steve saffel at a convention it was a one of the cons that we were going to uh yeah and i said you know i remember him sitting the two of us down and giving us a really fantastic talk he he was great but i said he he did he we actually asked to send him stuff and he said no and i said he's like i won't take a look at end agent submissions i'm like all right what should i be doing to you know make it in this market he said if you read the prologue of game of thrones do that and he was to a level right right um because the people who broke out just before us even kind of during our time were all grimdark that's what the everyone was hunting for um but i tried writing it and i was terrible at it uh i remember reading yeah i think i don't know if you actually shared your ideas yeah they were bad uh they were actually called missed it was called mistborn oh that's right yeah oh yeah it was totally different but it still had to miss cloaks and it yeah the magic system was great but i just wasn't a good man anyway i had written that and it got rejected and i had i'm like all right they don't want what i want because all of my epic fantasies got rejected they don't want me trying to write george martin plus i kind of hated writing that book anyway um so why don't i just give up and i decided no i'm going to keep writing i love this too much um and it i'm just going to keep going and i'm going to write the stories i want to write and i'm going to that experiment in chasing the market was a bad idea and i'm just going to go forward and that's when i started working on way of kings uh but the it was so liberating to as you kind of put earlier say i don't care what you think there's a part of me that doesn't because i have been unchained from having to worry about that because i had that moment of crisis and decided i would keep going no matter what yeah so i'm liberated from having to worry you know i had a very similar moment uh actually later in my career post-publication where after some convention i went out to dinner with you james dashner and brandon mull yep uh three of if not the three best-selling authors in the state and i was sitting here on my very lower mid list kind of nonsense that i was putting out um you know which is still to this day paying you know for my children to eat food you write the best nonsense let's be honest uh but something about the conversation you were having just really hit home to me how much better selling all of you were not necessarily i i didn't go home and think well i'm a terrible author i went home and thought my level of ex success is not even in the same ballpark as those three what am i doing i'm wasting my time and had that moment that very liberating moment you're talking about of and and it hit because i started thinking well i guess i need to start applying for jobs and go back to real work and now that i'm not uh you know doing this full time i'll actually have some free time again what am i going to do in my free time and the only answer i could think of was write books and i thought well oh okay i guess i'm not doing this because i want to make money or get rich or do anything i'm doing this because i love it well all right and then i was right back on board and writing more books and have been happy ever since one difference though is i do pay a lot of attention to what people are saying in my core fandom about my books um and this is in part because the cosmere as a whole i am i'm not changing like it it's madness to try to change you know what you're doing too much based on audience feedback yeah but i need to know if the ideas i am trying to present are connecting because i'm doing them across 20 years and if they're not connecting in the early books i need to make them connect in the middle books or the later books just are not going to function right yeah and so i do look at feedback and um and things from like the core fans and when people email me and stuff like that in a different way than i might then you might because i don't know i mean the whole the whole 20 to 30 year plan of the cosmere uh you know i've already done like 15 so 17 so the 20 or 30 more years of the cosmere it's gonna require me to course correct based on fan audience reactions yeah uh whereas you know i mean john cleaver did eventually balloon into six books because i wrote a second trilogy for it but for the most part uh the stuff that i have written thus far has been very one and done very you know thrillers are fast paced and you read them and and then you you move on speaking aside how did you not get in on this isn't why a thriller like the thing now weren't they in that like um i have submitted a lot of why a thrillers um and i don't know what happened there you're a better writer than than you know i'm not gonna name any names but it became the thing like two or three years ago and i didn't realize it because i wasn't writing yeah um [Music] a went through a huge shift after i got big in y a uh modern y a is mostly standalones it's mostly non-genre oh i mean by which i mean non-nonsense it's not sci-fi fantasy thriller is still a genre definitely yes and romance is still a genre and those are still big also and and for the most part i suspect that it's because every idea that i keep coming up with is has got a monster in it uh i keep coming back to supernatural things just because that's what i want to write i mean i did the same thing right i tried to write thrillers and it turned out to be you know the stephen lee's books which are basically fantasy um and science fiction yeah i do have one uh straight thriller which is ghost station uh which is pure no science fiction no fantasy no monsters no no anything but it's historical and so it still has that extra flavor in there i i think writing just a pure modern thriller with no other elements wouldn't be nearly as interesting to me unless it was about people stealing maple syrup um so feedback one of the things that i kind of want to talk about that you're like well i think i can only say one sentence on this was authors responding to feedback so it's different from getting this you know when you get these emails i assume you just don't write anything back well let me tell you one story where i did okay okay uh because uh and i've told you this story before um when the second book came out second john cleaver book mr monster which is the darkest one yes that's the one with the cat for people who are trying to remember yeah that's the that's the the most dismal one um when that book came out i got a piece of fan mail which i later found out came from a high school kid because he and i corresponded a few more times um and he sent one of those classic kind of 80 20 split emails which was i love this book it's one of the most well-written things i've ever seen it was fantastic it makes me want to be a writer but and then the line was and i can still quote this verbatim the only possible audience for this book is satan and saddam hussein because it was a really grim horror novel in which awful things happened to good people right i mean now doesn't even make that and stalin that's that's pretty uh yeah i mean hitler has to be in that group right i don't know maybe he i don't know yeah okay satan and saddam hussein maybe because they just had s's in them uh and the thing is the very next email in my inbox was from one of the local newspapers saying that the third book in the series had just won um the reader's choice award for novel of the year and so i wrote back to this kid and said oh hey guess what satan and saddam hussein voted this year and sent him the link and that was that was like one of the only times i have directly responded to criticism and in hindsight that was a little more aggressive than i would ever be today yeah that's a that's that's daring because one of the reasons that i wanted to bring this up is it's kind of a thing that goes around in the community um should you respond to reviews or not as an author and the general consensus is no don't just don't um and there is lots of wisdom in that because when an author responds and it doesn't make any headlines um i'm sure it happens all the time right it no one pays any attention to it but when an author responds and it is poorly constructed um the the internet loves a whipping boy loves somebody to be the person to make fun of for the day and anything you do that seems like you are inviting that um has a percentage chance of drawing that attention and ire and the truth is most of the time this is not going to have any sort of impact relevant impact on your career um depends on what we're talking about like if you are being racist or misogynistic or things then yeah i could but most of the time it's just you're being you're responding um you're being overly defensive and in ways that just are not very productive but the mental and emotional toll it will probably take on you um will be enormous and the rest if you are responding it's because someone got under your skin and so by its nature you are the type that then drawing that much more attention is going to be very bad for mm-hmm yeah if you can't handle not responding to one bad review you are really gonna hate the deluge that falls on you afterwards yeah when people pick this up and say oh look at this entitled author who freaks out and makes fun of their readers blah blah blah yeah we're not going to mention the author's name but one of the reasons this came up is that there is an author who was doing this recently the last couple of months and responding to a lot of uh critics in a way that felt very high and mighty um and there was a core kernel of of something interesting and worth pointing out um in this person's uh kind of um diatribes and it got overshadowed by the the comments and the drama and these sorts of things yeah um but the the kernel they're pointing out is it's really unfair that goodreads doesn't have half steps because um people are responding to my review my book by saying this is a four and a half star book i'm rating it four stars because there's no half step on yeah tweets and the authors basically worded poorly review was maybe could you round up to five that'd be really nice please um but they they didn't yeah and the thing is if someone comes out and says hey thank you so much for your this review i'm so glad that you would give it four and a half stars if you round it up instead of down that would help me a lot yes that's what the author is saying yeah but it comes across as how dare you not give me five stars um and it really reads that way uh it is it is a classic example of and this author seems to be one of those that really enjoys drama um and so they are poking the hornet's nest kind of on purpose and we have friends who do this and it is fun for some people i don't think this person is having a necessarily bad time of this drama but it's reminded me of this thing where it's probably just a bad idea to respond but there's a part of me that's like it is kind of sad that it's a bad idea to respond because there is no place to have this kind of discussion with an author um granted the author probably shouldn't be getting that granular um you know like the parasocial nature of relationships on the internet is already kind of dangerous and weird um but there is like there are times where people have had criticisms of my books that i don't think are valid we go back you know an episode or so whenever we were talking about the idea that i'm like here's what i consider of these two things one that i'm like yep i did this wrong let's talk about what i did wrong because it'll help everyone be a better writer here's one that i don't think i did wrong let's talk about why i don't think i did it wrong because again i think it will be illustrative of the writing process and it might be interesting for people to talk about but it's almost impossible to have that conversation without sounding defensive and argumentative and like that you are beyond criticism yeah uh the the few times that i have been able to kind of pull out negative reviews have been when they are obviously mockable right like if somebody has a a well thought out criticism whether i agree with it or not i am not going to touch it but one of my favorite reviews i've ever gotten if if you go to amazon and look up the one star reviews of i am not a serial killer pretty much across the board their complaint is i didn't think this had magic in it and it does this is terrible and that doesn't mean that they hated the book it means that they hated the genre and kind of felt tricked into reading it and that's on its face that's a valid criticism entirely it was our main criticism of the book and writing group as as i recall um saying we're worried not that we all liked it when it turned out to be magical but we all knew that right you have to be like i think people are gonna get feel tricked and so one of my very favorite reviews is one that says this was incredibly well written this was one of my favorite novels and then in chapter seven a monster shows up i don't read fantasy because i don't like talking animals and there's no talking animals in it but just that idea that as soon as something includes fantasy or horror it is for children yeah um irks me but yeah well there's there's this other issue here though that um part of the reason it's so easy to pile on the readers or the authors in these examples is it is hard to respond to review without punching down yeah uh particularly uh reviews just by anonymous people on the internet right uh even a an author who is not a mega bestseller has a lot more louder of a mega horn than um someone who doesn't and it can be can be just a bad idea to draw attention to things like um you know i've had this experience where i've had to be careful not to mention people or things because just by sheer nature of human beings being human beings if you draw a hundred thousand eyes to something a certain percentage of those people are going to be awful and are just going to ruin the experience for everyone yeah um i definitely you know well well i th that idea of punching down is one of the big reasons that i don't respond to criticism because first i don't want to seem petulant i also don't want to seem like a bully um if somebody much bigger than me attacked my book yeah like uh charlene harris for example she loved the first serial killer book if she had come out instead and said oh this is terrible i would have felt entirely justified making a joke about that on twitter and saying you know charlene is completely wrong about this and you should not trust her opinion on books like that would not have landed well with her fans but i would have felt confident making the joke well here's a good example of that i recommend that everyone read terry pratchett's editorial i believe it's in the guardians but it could be been a different um newspaper about jk rowling uh have you read this one i have not so jk rowling this there's this thing that happens that gets under the uh the skin of a lot of us in the community sci-fi fantasy writers and and fans where certain writers do not consider themselves fantasy writers fantasy novelists despite their books being fantasy and i think we overreact a little to this um but it is it is a sticking point it is something like um you know this is this is why uh not to speak too long you know he's passed away and whatnot but uh when goodkind in the early 2000s was uh talking about not being a fantasy novelist that's why it went over so poorly um is because we're like oh you think you're too good for being a fantasy novelist well jk rowling someone asked her if she read fantasy and she made some comments along the lines of this well i don't really consider myself a novelist of fantasy literature i i just write good stories that sort of sentiment right yeah which pops out quite a bit we've heard so many times um unfortunately you know margaret atwood has been like that times though she was good friends with ursula le guin and i believe ursula persuaded her to change the way that she spoke about some of these things um and whatnot i i still want to write a story about squids in space yes just because of her famous quote about science fiction but jk rowling said one of these and terry pratchett being the just treasurer that he uh was wrote a nice long editorial to the number one best-selling fantasy novelist from the number two bestselling fantasy novelist in um in england and um it is delightful and it's a good example of you know what there aren't a lot of people that terry pratchett could punch up at yeah but he took that opportunity to speak for all of us in a way that i really appreciate and you know taking on the potterheads is not an inconsequential thing to have done yeah during that time so good for you uh good for you terry pratchett sir terry pratchett um i'm in the middle of reading going postal right now you've been recommending that forever i uh i kind of parcel out my ratchet well we're not going to ever get into a measured way because i know i'll eventually run out and so i'm reading going postal it is i think almost unquestionably the best pratchett i've ever read it's so good i mean night watch it's hard to pick between it and night watch but um it will see as much as i love the vimes books yeah um if i if there's one i like more than going postal it's uh tiffany aching uh-huh because i love those but they are absolutely much younger man going postal i wish i could read it again for the first time um but um let's talk about weird feedback we've gotten weird yeah have you gotten weird feedback so here's this one's less weird but it'll it'll kick us into it one of my favorite things uh and i say that with the favoriting quotes right is how um how readers tend to see their experience with the story as being the only valid one and you know there is something to be said here like i write my books and i don't believe my books are finished until they're read i've said this before the reader gets to interpret the book the way that they want to i write the script you make the movie in your head the books in that way i think do belong to the audience i am different from a lot of writers in this regard in that um if i did not want to when to give them away i wouldn't publish them when i'm putting the book out there i'm giving it to the audience and when when you read one of my books you're you have line item veto uh power you can cross out the line and say no it didn't happen in my canon and i accept that as your canon and i think you are perfectly valid in doing that but it's when i get the the emails and i got two on the same day and i shared them around the company and this is kind of uh um endemic of what happens um one the first one was it was aft when the sample chapters of one of the stormlight books were going out i think it might have been oathbringer but it might have been words of radiance probably word anyway sample chapters were going up on websites people were reading them and sending me uh emails and responding and i got one because in a given this given chapter there had been two characters who had embraced in a very loving way shall we say um and the male character noticed certain parts of the female character's anatomy we're in his viewpoint okay um these are i believe married individuals um it was described in a i mean a pretty nothing i write gets to it was more explicit than i normally get but to call it explicit would make the rest of the fantasy community laugh yeah right um but you know it's a married couple embracing and they yeah so i get an email from um someone and i don't know if you've gotten these uh someone who uh who was probably religious and maybe from our same culture but maybe not um but it was the you are better than this brandon email right um i've gotten a couple of those the satan and saddam hussein email was definitely in that same family the you are supposed to represent something better than this and you have put this sleaze in your book and i am very disappointed in you um and you know i got the next email was from someone who said and i kid you not these were right back to back uh were you around at this time adam did you see these two uh it's ringing a bell but you've received several emails like this before um the next one said brandon i love your books but the way that you treat intimacy is so so bothersome to me because you don't go nearly far enough and it's distracting because human beings do not respond in such a reserved way as your characters and the fact that you don't put sex scenes in the books when it's a natural part of so many people's lives is really distracting to me and i would encourage and urge you to stop being so prudish and write the books the way that they should be written was this the third mistborn book no this this the third mistborn because i know there was a tent scene there was a tent scene what's his name yes no this i think was the third storm like i do have one in the third missed form book two but again so tame is to be so um and you know uh the third mistborn book it is you know it is also a married couple right um now the sixth myth book has the non-married couple uh um having some fun but i don't get as many emails about that one because people just expect wayne to be wayne i suppose i don't know why i don't get emails about that one i get emails about this other one which is far less explicit but okay um the two the contrast there and i don't think either of these writers has a bad point i think this the second email author uh explained their point way better and i kind of empathize with it more right because they just obviously i think were an older uh person and understood how to explain their idea and just said you know this is distracting for me in the books where the first one was kind of taking the shame shame wiggle the finger at you which is not a great way to provoke change um but yeah given the nature of that my i would definitely put money on them being from our same religion and i actually do feel a lot of pressure and it's it's very unspoken pressure yes no one has ever come to me and explicitly said you need to be a you know a paragon of virtue uh but i kind of maybe it's pressure i'm putting on myself to be a good representative of my own belief system yeah uh and so ghost station for example does have the first time that i have put oh these two characters are very obviously having sex uh it fades to black before that happens but there's two scenes in the book where you know that it's happening no they're not married yes they were drinking like all these things that i personally don't believe in and wouldn't do but these characters would um i haven't gotten any feedback on that because no one's ever read ghost station because it's been uh such a low profile book uh but i kind of do feel that like i need to make sure that i am kind of being uh an example of my own beliefs for people right but i don't know i mean yeah i think this is this is getting off on another another weird tangent very into the weeds but brandon and dan in the weeds um so i feel that one of my mandates as a storyteller is to represent life um and to depict and um and to depict people who have different ethics and belief systems of mine who are um who are good people is very important to me because i feel like as a i have certain beliefs and certain um you know things that i that i uphold and whatnot um i would not i would want people to look at me and say because he hopes that people will respect his beliefs and his worldviews that i can understand why he will respect other people's beliefs and worldviews um and when i'm writing in my books i am focused more on who is this person and what would they realistically do uh because depicting the world and depicting people the way they want to be represented is essential to my storytelling art and to my fundamental morality as a human being yeah um and that means that people are going to do things that i wouldn't do um but you know what i'm also not going to be on a battlefield swinging a giant sword chopping people in half um i am much more in person a pacifist than you might assume from my books i also really like a good action scene um and so um i don't know this has never been a thing that i can that i look at as a as a tension in my life uh it is me looking at the stores and saying you know there are there are certain things i don't do um as a writer but that's where my line is and [Music] my line is different from where my character's lines are though i don't know well and i think it also maybe this is an entirely different tangent but it's something very very american yeah for me to be completely fine writing six books about murderers and then feeling kind of weird about putting two sex scenes into a single book can i say though i um i respond against people who point who point who were like that's a hit that's a uh hypocrisy i'm not saying it's hypocrisy i just a very american culture it is a very american culture people like to point this on out on the internet as if they've got some big gotcha yeah right it's some big gotcha um but uh this is maybe getting too into religious stuff right not but i am commanded by the ten commandments to not kill so i don't do that i don't think i'd do it anyway but you know i'm that that's a fundamental tenant of my religion yeah um watching people in effigy or in you know kill each other not forbidden by my religion it happens in the scriptures quite a bit um and you know what um there there is no rule about not playing doom and ripping apart digital demons i'm not killing anybody and i don't think the arguments that video games or media cause um that sort of behavior hold up to any rigorous um never have in any study and so i don't think there's there's a problem at all what am i commanded by the new testament not to look at a woman and lust upon her that is literally in there from jesus christ himself yeah right um and so the depictions of um sexuality in media are a different beast entirely um if you are you know i had never thought of it in those terms yeah but interpreted that way it's absolutely true that uh kind of christian religions do treat depictions of violence very differently from depictions of sex and i think justifiably so i think there's an argument the other direction totally i'm just pointing out there is an argument there um that uh you know yeah and and i think for me i mean now that you've pointed that out i'm going to be thinking about it for a long time but uh for me it's mostly just you know i was raised in a culture where one thing was okay and one thing was not and so that kind of is just reflected in what i write and what i worry about living in germany they clearly have you know different different things bother them and for different reasons yes depictions of violence are generally like i remember that uh the little mermaid was censored in certain european countries uh where the ship stabs ursula because they said this is not okay by our rating systems if you want the general audience rating yeah and in hindsight i think it's astonishing that we were all just cool with it yes in this little kids show to watch a woman get impaled by a giant stick yes yes not just you know i mean i have i have some interesting different like in my household if i play a video game then my kids are allowed to blade um as long as it's not going to cause them nightmares um like i am on record is loving the new doom i keep bringing it up the new the doom reboot okay um my 11 year old i'm like yeah you can totally play doom if i'm playing doom you can play doom it's not gonna give you nightmares um and i i have a very i suppose particularly among our culture among our culture we are both um more liberal about these sorts of things than i think a lot of our contemporaries than most other people in our state but i think that like that's a thing that i know would horrify like my wife still has a problem with it i'm like you know yeah but i mean you're taking a chainsaw to demons they're digital demons he knows they're digital demons there is no no proof at all that this is going to turn him into a psychopath he likes it he thinks it's funny um so there there are you know there are going to be limits there because i do think little little kids um but my 11 year old anything any movie that i would watch i would probably let him watch um if he wanted to he's the type of person that when he watches a movie and something graphic happens he says dad how'd they do that is that ketchup like that's his response um that's a kid that's totally fine playing doom yeah and you all everyone knows their kids parents in a different way but i'm a little odd in that regard right like we have all played through halo which um like technically has an m rating on it i have no idea why um and she's like yeah i'm gonna play halo with my kids this is something i enjoy you know one of the things that i have learned um from audience feedback to approach our ostensible topic for this episode uh you know writing six books about a fifteen-year-old sociopath yes different people all have different levels different thresholds of what is acceptable and children in particular are incredibly good i would say better than most adults at policing their own uh media intake yeah i agree my 12 year old he loves a lot of stuff he loves action movies he loves excitement stuff zombies are something he cannot handle and whether it is you know the visuals or the blood or the corpses or whatever it is about a zombie movie uh he just is not down for it and will not watch it and he's very good at uh knowing what is going to cause him problems and what is not mm-hmm and yeah and i i hear this all the time from parents from kids people will ask me you know what how old should someone be before they read i'm not a serial killer and really that just comes down to you and the kid right you you know your kid better than i do um i've had kids as young as 11 read it and tell me they love it i've had people older than i am get halfway through and then throw it in the garbage and then write me an email about how they threw it in the garbage because why am i writing this kind of horrible stuff and it just people are very good people are better than we give them credit for at knowing where their own limits are yeah and i i think one of the one of the things that we can take away from this perhaps is uh on this topic and basically the whole topic this episode is this idea that you know what different people like different things have different thresholds understand interpret things different ways and interacting with a piece of art part of the fun of it is that you get to have your reaction to it and this is what i love about writing over other forms of media i mean i am a big movie buff i absolutely love movies um but a book is a little more unfinished even a finished book than a movie because you get to add so much to it and as a reader that created a relationship between me and books that me and films just had a different relationship to each other there's some prepositions in there but the the idea that i get to imagine what this character looks like um makes a participatory uh gives a participatory angle to fiction that i just love and you know um we i want to get your emails i want to hear what your particular you know interpretation of this was um and i understand if you can't hold yourself back to mention the things that you thought were the flaws in it totally get that totally understand that i'm not going to respond to those because it does feel like to me those i love this book but are a bit of a it can you have to be in the right mindset as an author to take feedback um at least i do meaning i need to be in the i have prepared myself for this feedback and have braced myself to accept it and to take it constructively and that's part of the point of beta reads and writing group for me well and i'm gonna say also and and we clearly disagree on this and that's totally fine i think that's one of the main purposes of something like goodreads like if i am looking for criticism i know where to find it yes if i want to know if a certain character landed or if there were if people had problems with some aspect of a book i know where i can go and find that don't put it in my inbox because then i have to see it whether i'm ready for it or not yeah and that's that's the problem that like i don't read fan mail unless i'm ready for it unless i am ready to get uh punched in the face i don't open my fan mail which has prevented me i used to read all of my fan mail and i don't anymore i don't know what a website says right now we may we probably have to update that right adam i think it says that i think a few years ago i had you guys updated uh because i no longer do i get too much i cannot read all the feedback and i have to put myself in that mindset of if there's something criticism here i got some good criticism in an email the other day i'm like that is legit that's gonna help me be a better writer but if i hadn't been in the mindset for that that might have been it for the writing for you know like i could totally see myself opening that up an hour before my writing session is done for the day and it kicking me in the face and distract me to the point that i'm just like it's not worth continuing right now yeah and so it's it's rough [Music] so there you go dear listeners send brandon your useful feedback don't send me any send me your feedback on dan's books yeah if you really loved my book except for that one part let brandon know and i probably won't read it because i don't read a lot of my fan mail anymore but adam landon's assistants know all the problems you have with in fact while we're at it uh if you've got a problem with charlie holmberg's books oh yeah send that to brandon's assistants too don't send it to her [Music] what we need is like we need to start just a service where we can just manage everybody's incoming fan mail i can't even manage mine come on we just hire somebody who's their whole job is to sit there all day and read everyone's incoming mail forward the ones they think will be useful forward all the just purely praiseworthy ones to each other be like here i'm sending this to brandon let people know how much people love dan's book clearly that's what i mean

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 65,843

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Id: lP7LW9adOoU

Length: 47min 57sec (2877 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021