What to Do with Criticism: Part One

Any time you share your work, you open yourself up to criticism. It's one of the hardest parts of writing, because it is the part you have no control over (and as writers, we love control. We are the gods of our own creations). From idea to execution, every decision, every word choice or character action, has been under our control. But eventually, if you ever want to be able to truly call yourself a writer, you're going to have to let somebody look at your creation. Because telling stories means nothing, if no one listens. 

This part of the process is scary, though. It's hard. We don't like it. Suddenly, someone else is going into your world. They're poking their fingers into cupboards you didn't want opened, and pointing out cobwebs in the corners of the plot, and getting awfully nosy about the lumps of character motivation under the rug. And it doesn't feel good. In just a few words of feedback, all those great little fantasies you secretly clung to are being blown apart: fantasies of being an unheard-of natural genius with talent the world would soon gape at, and of getting a three-book deal with your first query, and of being lauded in schools as the next Shakespeare... all those great and inspiring things you needed to believe, in order to get yourself through the difficult and arduous process of putting words down on paper...suddenly, all those dreams are shredded like so much copy paper, and flutter away on the winds of insecurity. Clouds of self-doubt roll in. It starts to rain, a soft, self-pitying downpour.

So what now? Once the feedback has come in, where do you go next?

There are, of course, the classic tactics: the "But I Did That On Purpose," and the "But I Don't Revise." The first is a phrase I usually hear from beginning writers, ones who have never had to take criticism before, and who don't yet understand a lot of things about writing. Usually these writers make basic mistakes, like switching tense and point-of-view freely and without reason, using flowery, purple prose, or writing something that is just, frankly, a little bit terrible.

"But I did in on PURPOSE," they say. "It's IRONIC."

Awesome. But the thing is, before you can write something terrible well enough for it to come across ironically, you have to be able to write something good. Unironically. Yes, there are great authors out there who can break every convention of writing and make great books with these broken rules, but they learned the rules before they broke them. Like Picasso, they learned to sketch accurately, before they went around drawing ears on top of people's heads and screaming horses. The BIDIOP excuse is really just a smokescreen, to avoid making changes.

People who say they "don't revise" just make me angry. In their opinion, "art" means some golden egg that floats, fully-formed and flawless, from the artist's butt. These are the same people who sit around and wait for "inspiration" before they write, and they are the people who produce the worst "finished" work (since their finished work is their first draft). 99.99% of the time. 0.01% of the time, a "non-reviser" will open up their butt and a glorious golden egg, shining like a sunset, will float out, and then we hate them even more. As Anne Lamott says of one of this breed, "We do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her."

But I digress.

These are the three most important things to remember when dealing with criticism:

1. Be grateful someone is taking the time to criticize you. If someone you think is smart and well-read enough to have a valuable opinion is willing to read your work, then you are doing something right. No matter what they say, remember this.

2. Admiring or positive feedback (like someone saying, "That was great! I loved it!") is nice and reassuring, but it is not helpful. In the same token, feedback that is totally negative or un-actionable (like someone saying, "You just haven't lived long enough or read enough books to write; try again in 10 years") is not going to help you. Both of these kinds of advice, in my opinion, go in the same trash can. If you take praise too seriously, you'll get that soaring conviction of your own genius that assaults so many writers (well... me), and won't be looking at your work honestly; if you take the condemnation too seriously, you'll get discouraged, hate yourself, and stop writing, possibly turning to absinthe, menthol cigarettes, and/or a life of clown prostitution with the circus to fill the void (again, me). Only criticism which gives you somewhere to go is worth listening to.

3. You don't have to like the solution the feedback offers, but you do need to pay attention to the problem it points out. Too often, when people see a problem, they want to fix it. I was once told that I needed to change my protagonist's gender. Puzzled (and mortally wounded), I asked why. 
"I don't find the character's dialogue believable for a guy," the helpful criticism-provider said. 
For me, changing the character's gender was not a feasible solution; but unbelievable dialogue was a problem I could tackle. When receiving criticism, always focus on the problem they're pointing out, and what might be valid about that, not necessarily the solution they have come up with.

As a woman of many words, I find I have more to say on this topic than can fit into one post; stay tuned for tomorrow's follow-up, where I will tackle the problem of people-pleasing and give helpful hints for dealing with that nasty circus-borne syphilis.