Random thoughts on feedback & mistakes . . .

For a writer, living in the age of social media, email, and the Internet means that you get lots of feedback on your work. Personally, I think it’s one of the best things about writing these days.

Naturally, we all love positive feedback, a generous sentence or two can make a day – or even a week. It certainly spurs me on. But negative feedback is useful as well.

Recently I got a pretty hot and oddly personal comment from a reader, claiming I'd made a huge mistake in one of my books. The only problem was the reader was wrong, by quite a bit; it was a mistake about a non-mistake.

I can only sympathize. I've done that myself. Hopefully, I've kept my temper about it better; the shoe leather is a little softer if the insertion is gentler . . .

I truly appreciate readers who go out of their way to point out errors they find in my books. It helps me correct them – not just in future editions of that book, but in other work as well. And candidly, I’ve met a lot of great and very knowledgeable people through my mistakes – though I should hasten to say that I don’t make the mistakes for that reason.

One of these days, I’m going to sit down and write a long dissertation on how errors get into books. There are certainly a number made in haste. And then there are those that we – I – make because we think we know something, but don’t.

I find the most interesting are weird mind-flips – things that of course you (or I) know are wrong upon reflection, but are made because of some sort of weird trick the mind played at some point. What weird trick of the unconscious introduces a name or description that isn’t what we thought we were thinking (and writing) about? The mind is a strange, strange land.

A mentor – I forget who it was now – once told me that mistakes are the only things we can truly call our own.  A strange claim to originality and ownership, I suppose.