Defining ego for the purposes of this piece is a good place to start because a lot of people see the word as about conceit or overly inflated importance.
What I am talking about is the "I" or self of any person-- as thinking, feeling, willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from objects of thought. Or even more exactly, in psychoanalysis, the part of the psychic apparatus that experiences and reacts to the outside world mediating between the primitive drives of the id and the demands of the social and physical environment. It can also be thought of as self-esteem or self-image.
At the 2012 Republican Convention, when President Obama got taken to the woodshed by an elder of our country, it was followed by a lot of analysis from right and left wing political factions. When Obama was asked what he thought about it, he said, "One thing about being president or running for president - if you're easily offended, you should probably choose another profession." That could be said for the creative arts as well.
Earlier I wrote a post explaining how I believe anybody can write, not anybody can write a book, and even less can write a book that others will want to read. It's the third part where ego comes into play for the writer. You can write all you want but until you try to market it, as long as you keep it to yourself, you don't get into potentially ego bruising or changing territory. It can remain the greatest work the world will never see.
With any of the creative efforts, it's when you put your own creative self out there to be valued or devalued by others that you better have a strong ego or it's going to tear you and your work apart. By strong ego, I don't mean over inflated, but confidence in the work and the message being presented. Without that sense of self and purpose, I think reviews would potentially be very difficult to read and that probably goes for those by professionals, who are out there to tear apart, as well as today's most common reviewer-- a reader who enjoys writing about what made a book work or not for them.
Years ago I sent my work out to various editors to get it back with rejections. That wasn't so hard on my ego as you might expect as usually the rejections were often accompanied by some nice words about my writing skill. The problem was the message, that what I wrote didn't suit their need for a romance novel-- and romance novels are what I have always wanted to write.
I understood that my goal for writing love stories had an element that wasn't common to romance novels of the time. There is likely a reason for that. What the publishers wanted is what they could sell. What I wanted, which was to put something more to the story than love and angst, was getting in the way.
When I decided to ePub, I skipped over the editors and took the work directly to the readers (assuming any could find them). Today there are ten books with more to come, for anybody to look at, analyze and sometimes review from the text to the covers to the blurbs. Some of those reviews have stung and caused me look again at the work. Do I need to change something? Can I change what they don't like and still keep the work true to its purpose?
Once you get past the ego bruising part of it, the advantage of reviews is to help the writer look at the work through other eyes. For me, it lets me see if what they didn't like truly got in the way of my message? Can I change what that reader wanted without losing the truth of the book, the essence of the story and characters? I read such a negative review the other day, and it did make me look back at one of my books anew.
This blog has gone on long enough; so I'll pick up that review or the essence of it (I don't take words from others without permission and not about to ask permission in this case) and discuss how I see what was said.
