A Criticism of Criticism

Nobody enjoys being criticized. Imagine that after you work through one or two (or five) drafts of a chapter, erase all the doodles in the margins, read it over a million times, deemed it your best work yet, you finally decide to show it to someone. Now imagine that instead of marveling at your literary genius, they point out every spliced comma and forgotten conjunction, each tiny spelling mistake, and then proceed to tear away at the plot and characters and say it's too short and too dramatic. And this leaves you feeling that nobody loves you but God and the cat. (The dog is playing with your critic.) Everyone, whether or not they own a cat, has been through this: they expect to get praise, and get problems instead.

(Almost as bad is when you hand a completed draft of Chapter Whatever to your sibling, and they take forever to read it, and then all the pages are out of order, and then when you ask how they like it, they say, "It's okay," and won't elaborate. It's worse when they don't finish it or won't start it in the first place.)

The lesson here is, it's not about how your critics receive your work, it's about how you receive their criticism. Fix your technical mistakes, add a few more details, tone down the drama, and stop handing finished drafts to your brother. It's easy to let critics get you down, but when they do, it's even easier to use their words to lift your piece up.

Say mom doesn't like the length, or dad wishes there were more dialogue tags, or your cousins think it's boring, or your friends have unanswered questions. You can turn what at first sounds like trash-talk into a veritable treasure-trove.