As long as I can remember I have been taking myself out. Viciously criticizing myself. I can remember, as a child of nine or so, going through my room and clearing out old stories and drawings that I’d done. My mother practically begged me not to throw them out.

‘They’re terrible,’ I said. I couldn’t stand to see them around, in their clumsiness and naivete and failure.

‘Someday you’ll wish you had them,’ she told me. And I do.

I have the same conversations with my own kids. I sneak my daughter’s artwork away and hide it before she can destroy it. One of my sons will rip his stuff up and scribble over it if you compliment it. And here I have been trying so hard not to model any self-deprecating or self-destructive tendencies.

Maybe I’ve been unsuccessful. Maybe it’s innate.

I don’t attack my own work anymore. Not even in private. I will tell you why I spent the first 40 years of my life doing it, though.

I thought I was helping myself. I thought that if I were my own harshest critic, then I would make myself stronger. If I imagined every possible way that I could be criticized and got there first, then I would somehow have the magical power to stop criticism from hurting me.

I would save myself looking like a fool.

It’s like Inspector Clouseau and Kato. I thought I was creating an internal attack dog that would ambush me and keep me on my guard. Somehow by keeping this dog chained up in my house it would act as a prophylactic against future harm.

The problem with the dog is that if you train it for long enough, it can beat the hell out of you. I mean, think of Clouseau and Kato. Clouseau wins mostly by luck, sometimes by dirty tricks. Kato has nothing to do all day but think of ways to hurt Clouseau. (You also have to reckon he despises Clouseau and is only doing this job because he’s been exploited by the colonial hierarchy—after all, he’s a man, not a dog—but that’s another story). If Kato gets tired of this charade, you just know that the bumbling Inspector is going down.

When you keep a prophylactic attack dog, you risk the same thing. You will come staggering in one night with your broken umbrella, drenched to the skin, just wanting a bit of shelter and rest. And the thing will get you by the throat and tear you to pieces. You’ll find it’s not your house anymore. The dog will lock you in the cupboard under the sink with the plunger and the bleach, eat your food and sleep in your bed—because that’s what you’ve trained it for.

It’s a long road back making friends with that anthropomorphic cigar-smooking tyrant pooch, I can tell you. Convincing it to let you have a few scraps and sleep on the rug is the best you can hope for at first.

Everyone needs an internal critic at some level. I’m not saying that I reckon all of my writing farts rainbows and every sentence I produce should be enshrined in all eternity. But the internal critic needs to be a friendly, loyal dog who will be on your side to guard you against that shit outside. Not an attacker from within. Be very, very careful how you feed your dog and how you treat it, and how you let it treat you.

For many of us, sooner or later there comes a point where work gets hard and there’s no support at all from the outside world. That’s when you feel besieged. The fear of getting it wrong stops you. That whipped feeling stops you. The resounding silence from readers stops you. And if all you have at home is a dog that you’ve trained to attack you, then that’s not the kind of dog you want.

While I was getting dressed this morning the following question ambushed me–like they do, when you’re on a writing deadline–so violently that I felt compelled to tweet about it:

Can you critique a thing while indulging in its worst excesses?

I have to finish this effing book and I’m not supposed to be on twitter and I’m not supposed to be blogging so I’m pretty embarrassed that I’ve broken my vow so quickly. And I admit when I asked this question I was maybe gearing up to go off on one. But I have changed my mind. So (although I’m digesting the comments & links, thank you for offering them) this post isn’t going to be about The Books That Got It Wrong. It’s going to veer somewhat.

Earlier today when I asked the question, I was thinking of some works that have been hailed as wonderful though they struck me as meatheaded poop playing straight for the worst side of Hollywood. Fortunately for us all, in the course of the subsequent chat I have realized something more interesting.

In asking the question I wanted the answer to be NO you CANNOT critique something and indulge in its worst excesses also. Can. Not. Be. Done.

Then I thought a bit and within about ten seconds I thought of The Shining Girls.

And then, right on the heels of that came two other books that have been talked about a lot lately, God’s War and Ancillary Justice.

(I tested NK Jemisin’s work in my mind against this question. What I’ve read of her is not so much subversion as a complete rehaul—different story)

To my mind, these works take male-dominated forms (serial killer, military fantasy, space opera) and critique their content while at the same time being good strong examples of the form and that are not afraid to go into darkness, sensation. ‘Worst excesses?’ Well, no. But if they did I’m not sure I’d blame them.

So we see male-created forms being repurposed, reclaimed perhaps, by women. It’s got to take some considerable insight, care, and cleverness to pull this off successfully. Does it also take the empathy of living inside a woman’s skin?

Could a man have written The Shining Girls? If the author had been a dude, would the book have pissed me off?

I’m afraid that it probably would have. Good thing Lauren didn’t need to use a male pseudonym.

These are some of the questions I ask myself when interrogating my sense of what feels OK, interesting and what feels horrible. It seems unfair of me. Shouldn’t the author’s name be scrubbed off the book when receiving their work? Am I not ashamed to admit how I really feel?

I’m so done with being ashamed of stuff like that. There are things I feel bad about but this isn’t one of them.

Of course, in some cases there’s no judgment call to be made.  It’s obvious that the cutting-edge edge-cutter I’ve just read is unconsidered, ill-thought, and lazy to a degree that’s inexcusable even if the author’s name is Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

And then I realise what is really going on in my head. I am feeling oppressed by the sexy violent thriller form, which always seems to be lurking there as ‘What the System Wants.’ It has always felt like a straightjacket to me. And I feel like it’s blocking my light.

I once tried to write a story about pushing back against The Hollywood. I could do the critique part easy. I could do the played-for-laughs part about getting a bit of crunchy revenge, as a woman–that was almost embarrassingly easy. And then I came to the part where the alternative had to be offered up. And I had nothing.

Absolutely fuck all, I had.

It was like the time after a few pregnancies when I tried lean way over and grab something off a high shelf and I lost balance and fell because there was a gaping hole in the middle of my abdomen where my recti muscles used to be. I reached and I got nothing.

You know what else it was like? It was like the end of Thelma and Louise. I mean, when you’re turned your back on the whole charade, when you’ve said FUUUUUCKKKK YOOOUUUUUU where do you go except off into the blue sky? The blue sky is empty. The blue sky is falling.

So if you are Louise and/or Thelma and/or their unfortunate automobile, how do you do a Ray Bradbury: jump off a cliff and build your own wings on the way down?

This is what I ask myself as a woman SF writer—and I’m a white, American woman SF writer, so I’m like only maybe a degree or two Different to the accepted ‘norm’ insofar as origins go.  And I feel daunted.

It’s one thing to push back against a known adversary. It’s another thing to build something from scratch.

Especially when nobody wants baked-from-scratch. They want something that fits in a package. The package determines the product, it seems to me. And I see newer writers getting discouraged because of this, placing limitations on themselves when they should be in the blue sky.

There are many story forms on this planet that lie beneath the Western cultural radar. Wouldn’t it be cool to discover them? Wouldn’t it be cool to invent new ones.