Dealing With Criticism

If you write, you will have to deal with criticism. Your writing is your heart and soul. It is the peak of your eloquence. It is you, outside of your body. When your writing is criticized, we feel as if we at our very core are being criticized. It hurts very badly. Nobody likes it, but it has to happen. Here are some tips I've found to help deal with criticism.

Get your drafts critiqued. Anything that has not been published is still a draft. Drafts have the quality that you know they aren't perfect. When you have people criticize work that you yourself are not happy with, it takes a lot of the sting away. If you get a first draft critiqued, it's not even like people are criticizing so much as they are helping you flesh out your writing. I would not that at this stage in the writing process, it would behoove you to find somebody who you trust and whose opinion you respect to read your work.

Look for the facts. Positive and negative reviews are opinions based on facts. If somebody likes your main character because his name is a butcher named Johnny Salami and another person hates your main character for the same reason, then you at least know that both people realize your technique. The next step is to find the reasoning why they think your facts are good or bad. If the person liked it because it made him chuckle, but the other person hated it because the story isn't supposed to be funny, then the latter opinion carries more weight.

Deal with it. If you wrote a book that was the New York Times bestseller for 26 weeks in a row, you will still find people who thoroughly hate your work. Build a thick skin. Some people just aren't in your intended audience. You can't please them no matter what you do, so let them go be unhappy.