Sticky Opinions & Knocking Ideas
WN.08 \\ 07.22-28.24
Greetings, swamplings!
The lower right quadrant of the country feels like a warm, wet blanket has been thrown over the sky. It’s haht. And sticky.
Welcome to my off-weekly off-the-cuff review of efforts, insights, and whatevers in the last few days.
This week’s notes include thoughts on:
testing a podcast idea: is this thing on?
opinions, everyone’s got one: so what do you do with it?
I have no third thing. Oops.
Idea Validation
I’ve played around, for almost a year now, with the idea of starting a podcast.1 Since it keeps knocking on my commitment door, I figure it’s one that deserves welcoming.2 I’ve spun some mental gears, come up with a purpose and goal, and would love to see if this podcast idea has legs. So take a look at the description, and let me know what you think via the poll.
On People Watching, we figure out what it looks like to become the role model we’ve always wanted by chatting with real people who’ve found real role models in their own lives. Episodes feature stay-at-home parents, professionals in business and ministry, community leaders and laborers, artists and creatives - folks you’d probably encounter in your daily life.
Through these diverse perspectives and experiences, we uncover what it looks like to be a flourishing human through reorienting our desires, choosing wisely, and changing our behaviors. Conversations explore questions of meaning, purpose, and significance, and the many ways in which we learn to make decisions about the kind of life we wish to lead. Also tacos. 🌮
Having & Receiving Opinions
Through a happy intersection of circumstance and knowing the right people, I’ve received a project to read a manuscript under contract and provide a reader’s report for the publisher/editor.
I mean, you want to pay me? To have opinions? About books?
I’m ya girl.3
The book’s thesis is interesting, and it’s fun to flex my analytical muscles in considering how the structure supports the premise, etc. It’s also an exercise in providing constructive feedback from my experience, without asserting my creative perspective. It’s the difference between thinking, “Well, if I was writing this, I would…” and thinking, “What would make this the best book possible?” Because I’m not writing this book.4 And though it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever meet the author, I genuinely want them to succeed in their endeavor.
This project has me thinking about being an artist or creator of any kind, and what it looks like to give and receive feedback. Cuz let’s be real: most of us have no idea how to provide constructive critique on a lot of things.
On the one hand, as an artist or creator, you have GOT to learn how to grow a thick skin. Unless someone has proven that they’re out to sabotage you, assume that editors5 are there to HELP make the work (and you) the best it can be for the time.
The best thing you can do as a reviewer is to learn the “rules of the game” - understanding narrative structure and poetic forms in writing, for example, or form, perspective, value, and lighting for art.
The next best thing is to be able to break down your own visceral responses to a work. If you find a written passage humorous, but it’s inside a horror story, ask the writer if that’s what they intended. And if not, see if you can pinpoint what made it funny. Is it the scene, or its location in the story? Is it the characters’ reactions? And so on.
I’ve shared poems for feedback that I thought were seriously earnest, only to have some readers chuckle at them. I realized that, huh, actually, the piece could be humorous. I didn’t change anything about the poem, but I did open up my perspective on how the poem could be.6
And here’s the other hand:
Creators need to find a way to make their work separate from themselves.
Once you decide you want more people to see it than your family, it’s not “yours” in the same way it was when you created it.
Of course you want a good response (and it’s lovely when your audience doesn’t see all the flaws you do), but at the end of the day, what you intended when you created it gets diluted or transmuted when …y’know…the people you created it for take it in.
And creators need to remember that that’s the point. Your work takes on a life of its own once it gets out into the world. And just like everything else, you have very little control over where it goes or what it does. It’s terrifying, but also…pretty cool.
That’s all for this week, folks. Let me know what you think!
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
Let’s work together!
I offer practice-based workshops, designed to empower participants to improve their mastery of the chosen topic and skill beyond our time together. My goal is to help individuals and groups cultivate priorities, practices, and structures that are purpose-focused, replicable, and sustainable over a lifetime.
Visit me online to learn more!
Megan J. Robinson / People Watching © 2024 by Megan J. Robinson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
At least into the foyer.
Though I am taking notes, betcha betcha.
Or the equivalent in your field.
“Ars Poetica,” by Archibald Macleish