Every Writer Needs a Friendly Critic

In Howard Gardner’s book Creating Minds, the author examines the idea of creativity through the lives of seven major artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Freud, Picasso, Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot.  As a writer myself, I went immediately to the chapter on Eliot, which opens with a discussion of a draft of The Waste Land discovered in 1968, in a collection at the New York Public Library.

Eliot had originally given the draft of the poem to his wife Vivien and to his friend and fellow writer, Ezra Pound, also an ex-pat poet living in Europe.  Pound, it turns out, suggested changes to the original “that reduced the poem to approximately half its length.”

Later in the chapter, Gardner becomes more specific: ”While highly suggestive and full of sections with undeniable power, the original manuscript was bloated….There was much indecisiveness, repetitiveness, and monotony: too many voices and too little sense of overall direction, control, and locale.  Pound’s feat was in carving away the overstated sections that pulled the poem in diffuse directions and in both sharpening the remaining verses by crossing out unnecessary or misleading words or phrases and eliminating many hedges and ambivalent tones.”

Vivien, Eliot’s wife, also made changes that Gardner says “nicely complemented Pound’s,” changes that were the result of her “excellent ear for specific lines.”  Gardner refers to both Pound and Vivien as Eliot’s “friendly critics,” helping him to create this masterwork of early 20^th century literature.

It gave me great comfort to learn this.  Those of us who write and teach writing know that though done in solitude our stories, poems, and essays are really collaborative efforts, dependent on our own “friendly critics” to help make them tighter, more focused, more engaging.  And while it’s not always easy to hear that we haven’t created a masterpiece on our first, or fifth, or even twelfth try, we recognize the value of the input we receive from our first readers. 

And as I tell my students, we may not make all the changes suggested by others—we are, after all, the final authority on our own writing—but we are grateful for what these comments teach us.   Which is why I open every writing workshop with the LaChapelle maxim:  "When one of us learns something about writing, we all do."

And so may we all, as Eliot did, use our "friendly critics" to help us find the great work lurking within our own literary efforts.