Making a Macho Man Cry

One of the highlights of my writing career

Over the first twenty-some years of my fifty-plus year writing career I almost never let anyone read my writing. I did not write for readers but rather for the story. I wrote in order to flush stories out of my being. If I did not write I got constipated with stories — and that is not healthy.

Those first couple decades of writing were woefully lacking in feedback. But I did in fact get a teeny tiny bit of feedback. I can count the times on my hands. It was always when someone asked to read something. I never offered it to anyone. That tiny bit of feedback was always extremely negative.

Once it was mind-blowingly negative.

A girlfriend I had been dating for a couple of months asked me one day if she could read something I wrote. I was always talking about being a writer but I never asked her to read anything. What was up with that?

So I gave her the first two chapters of a novel I was working on at the time. I waited patiently and anxiously for her to read them. When she was done reading she threw the typewritten manuscript pages violently at my face then went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.

Now most people would consider that to be negative feedback, right? I did, at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if my words could illicit such an incredibly strong reaction then my writing could not be all bad, right?

So anyway, over the next three-plus decades of my writing career I decided that perhaps feedback was part of writing. So I opened up my writing to be read. I eventually began publishing to the masses, knowing that feedback was inevitable and possibly even helpful.

I continued getting plenty of negative feedback but I also, for the first time in my life, started getting positive feedback. Eventually, the positive feedback began to outnumber the negative. At first I did not know how to react to positive feedback. I had never gotten any before. I kept wondering what I was doing wrong.

I continued to learn how to accept positive feedback (or so I tell myself). I tried hard not to let any feedback influence me. I continued to write for the story instead of the reader but I would be a liar if I said feedback had no effect on my writing. It did. But I tried hard not to let feedback feed my ego (both negative and positive feedback). But it was helpful in very mildly shaping the language of my writing.

I opened up to feedback. But then I got some feedback that I had never gotten before…

It came in response to my third published novel. It was a novel that had been in my head for around five years. I spent a couple of years writing it in order to get it the hell out of my noggin. I had to flush it.

After it was published I started getting feedback and it was all positive. Over a dozen women contacted me to tell me that the novel literally made them cry!

When asked what it was that made them cry they all responded that it was one particular passage in one particular chapter near the end of the book.

I went back and reread that chapter and it was pretty damn good but taken out of context it simply was not enough to make me cry. It was the long story that led up to that passage that made the passage so impactful. When I was writing it I was simply writing out the story and had no idea that one passage would be so perfect. Like I’ve said, I was writing for the story and not the reader.

Over a dozen women were touched enough by the story to cry. It was by far the best feedback that I had ever gotten…

But then things got even better! I learned that a very macho man also broke down into tears upon reading that passage.

I knew this man was very macho because I had known him for almost thirty years. I worked construction with him for five years. He is my closest male friend on the planet. In all the thirty years I had known him I never once saw him cry or well up in emotion. He was a macho man and macho men don’t cry!

He knew I was a writer because I talked about it for years but he never read anything that I wrote and never asked to. He understood my passion, though, because he was a creative artist himself — except with his hands, not words. He was a construction dude and had created some very impressive works of art. But he was not a reader and he never read a word I ever wrote. He started reading maybe five or six books a year and only finished half of them. If he had a motto it would have been, ‘Why read when you can have a beer?’

Then one day he called me up (we now live on opposite ends of the country) and said that he ordered a paperback copy of that novel on Amazon. He said that when it arrived he immediately started reading it and he simply could not put it down. It is a pretty fat book but he read it in four days. He then told me that when he got to a certain point in the book he had to put it down because he was balling like a baby. He could not stop crying!

I made a macho man cry! I made a macho man cry!

It was the pinnacle of success for me as a writer. And, by the way, it turned out to be the very same passage that made all those women cry. It was good to learn that in fifty-plus years of writing that I managed to write one perfect passage. I never would have known that if it were not for the feedback I got.

So I guess feedback can play an important role in the development of a writer (provided it is taken constructively). The one thing I learned for sure is that crying (especially a macho man crying) is far better feedback than vomiting.

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