Embracing Inappropriate, Violent & Blasphemous: Three Writers Make Negative Reviews a Fashion Statement...

As I prepare for the SCBWI Annual Winter Conference I thought it was about time I followed-up with three of my favorite Annual Summer Conference attendees, Emily Wing Smith, Brodi Ashton and Bree Despain, to talk about their outfits.

I spotted Emily, Brodi and Bree at the LA conference this past August wearing these t-shirts:


Word shirt ring leader Emily Wing Smith told me the terms emblazoned on their chests—"blasphemous," "violent" and "inappropriate"—were all stinging comments they heard about their own novels.

Below the three talk about those negative critiques, how they were impacted, and how they forged ahead through fashion.


Emily Wing Smith
I N A P P R O P R I A T E

When I wrote my YA novel THE WAY HE LIVED, I expected some backlash. After all, the book deals—however briefly—with some serious themes: suicide, homosexuality, mental illness. But I wasn’t prepared for the words of an anonymous commenter who left a review on a book retailer’s website, claiming she “tried to overlook the references to homosexuality and other inappropriate matters” but ultimately couldn’t get past it.

Okay, so I don’t happen to believe that homosexuality is an inappropriate matter. I don’t think anyone should believe that. But what really baffled me? Being offended by even a reference to something she deemed inappropriate. I believe that murder is inappropriate, but I’m not offended when someone refers to it. Maybe that makes me inappropriate—if so, then my “Inappropriate” t-shirt is actually appropriate!

www.emilywingsmith.com


Brodi Ashton
V I O L E N T

My YA book ECHO features a teenage girl who becomes an alien hunter, so I wasn’t surprised when readers called it “too violent.” The problem came when I tried to change every scene that had offended someone. I quickly learned two things: 1) No two people were offended by the same scene; 2) If I removed every scene that had one detractor, there’d be no book left.

Not everyone is going to like my book. Someone, somewhere, is going to think a story about a teenage girl who can kill an alien with a fork will be too violent. But if I let myself think that too, I never would’ve typed “The End” and found an agent who thinks my book is just violent enough.

My “Violent” t-shirt was a smart move because it got me to the front of one of the lines at the SCBWI conference. The lady said I could cut because she didn’t want to mess with me.

www.brodiashton.blogspot.com


Bree Despain
B L A S P H E M O U S

I think for many authors, one of the hardest things to deal with is occasionally hearing negative feedback about our book. It doesn’t seem to matter how much praise, or how many awesome reviews we receive, when somebody finds something not to like about our books, or is offended by something we wrote, we can let that negative energy eat away at us—sometimes even to the point where we find ourselves unable to write.

Around the same time that Emily’s book received a particularly upsetting review because of some supposed inappropriate references, I was dealing with getting over something someone else had said about my book THE DARK DIVINE. A writer friend had read the manuscript and told me that she thought my book was “blasphemous” because I talked about faith and mythological paranormal creatures in the same story. She also worried that people would think it was blasphemous to use a teenage girl as a metaphor for grace and redemption. I didn’t agree with my friend, but I found myself wondering if I needed to rewrite my entire book in a way that it couldn’t possibly offend anyone. (A completely impossible feat, I soon discovered.)

Luckily, Emily, Brodi, and I decided that instead of letting the negative things people said about our books cripple our writing; we would just put our bad reviews on t-shirts and “own” them. Our bad review t-shirts have been a lot of fun to wear. People love to stop us to talk about our shirts, which always leads to discussions about our books—and Sherman Alexie even remembered our names because of them!

www.breedespain.com