on surviving the beta read

in early October, i sent “draft 5 of my book,” called To Name the Fire, to my writing group. when i finished this draft, I didn’t think it was perfect; what I thought was that it was the best I could do without outside help. i in fact had a list of things I thought probably were wrong with it; according to my beta readers, I was right about half of those, and then there were a small handful of things i hadn’t thought about at all which needed addressing. (if you just want to hear me talk about those things, go here.)

i was expecting for this process to be difficult. i wasn’t quite expecting the level of emotional intensity i experienced the next day. not because my beta readers said anything mean to me — in fact, they were overall quite complementary — but because sharing an entire book with a bunch of people is really fucking hard.

it would be easy for me to write about the changes my book requires, and I will, but i suspect that the most interesting thing about me as a person is my desire to translate my personal, emotional experience of life into words, so i’m going to do that, as best as i can.

to me, the creative drive is something that seems almost to come from without. it feels like a directive. i create — art, songs, a book, now — because i feel like i have to. i have a whole philosophy about what i believe is the best way to maintain a healthy relationship with this drive, and I’m not going to get into that here, but suffice it to say that whatever this thing is, it feels like the most fundamental part of myself. most of the time, when i write a song or paint a picture there’s a relatively tangible emotional payoff: i expressed the emotion. i can point to it. “that’s how i feel.” if you want to understand, you can listen to the song. you can look at the picture. you can read the blog.

my book is not like that.

i have been wanting to write this book for so long that it’s hard for me to put into words why i’m writing it. the short answer is that i fucking have to. but why do I have to? why is it so imperative that I write an entire book about this?

i know, you’re here to read about integrating feedback — but for it to even be possible to understand what this process felt like, i need you to understand where this book is coming from inside of me. *

my book is about a lot of things, but at the heart of it is this question: can you change who you are? perhaps even more importantly: should you? there is, hiding beneath it, yet another question: can you ever really know who you are?

I do not believe these questions have answers. i believe that they are ouroboroi: they are questions which alter the asker in the mere asking of them. a major plot point of my book revolves around the idea that learning who you really are — externalized by the metaphor of true names — changes you. some cannot survive the learning. but ironically, only by accepting what the true name tells you about yourself can you ever hope to intentionally enact change upon yourself.

ursula k. le guin pulled this off beautifully in a wizard of earthsea, and when I read that book I recognized a kindred story with intense joy. but le guin’s book is almost entirely sexless; and i, well, i’m not. my book does not ask if we can change ourselves in an abstract way. it uses sexual desire as its vehicle of exploration. my book is not erotica, but it is inherently sexual (something I struggled to come to terms with for a long time; more on that another time). if i told you that this is because i’m queer and needed to explore that, that would be an easy-to-digest narrative and we’d all go home happy. but, really, it’s not that simple. it’s because, to me, the sexual drive — like the creative drive — seems to bypass reason and seems to come, at times, from without.

you want what you want.

but can you change what you want? what if you don’t want to want it? i know it might sound like i’m being silly but this question has intense and serious implications for me, not just because i’m queer, but because i’m a human person who experiences emotional and sexual desire (including heterosexual desire, much to my own dismay) and i don’t always want to.

and i had to write a book about it. i had to. i didn’t have a choice.**

so, i spent a really long time learning about narrative structure and character flaws and avoiding purple prose, and i shared some chapters and got feedback and then i stopped sharing anything at all and i wrote a lot of drafts totaling hundreds of thousands of words and at the end of it, i had “draft 5” and i felt, for the first time, not like i had a perfect book but that maybe, just maybe, I had managed to ask this impossible question.

then i let some trusted writers read it and asked them for feedback. about seven weeks later, on November 29th, we met up over zoom and they told me all kinds of interesting things, mostly very nice things, some very helpful things, some things I disagreed with.

then we all signed off and i realized that no matter how well i wrote this book — no matter how skillfully — the question at the heart of it would remain unanswered.

because it has to.

it’s not exactly that I thought writing this book, or sharing it, would answer the question. the very unanswerability of the question is what drove me to write it in the first place! but i thought, perhaps, that in exporting it to someone else’s mind i might have some relief from being alone with it.

but that’s the thing about wondering who you are — you can’t really share or escape it.

it belongs to you and you alone.

*i’ve addressed the specific feedback in a different post

**if I had known my true name could i have excised this desire from my heart…?