No Hard Feelings: How to Take Criticism Better
By: Atlas Sallow
Tags: Writers On Writing, Writing Advice, Writing Tips, Authors, Criticism

Image by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

So, you’ve completed a new piece. Maybe it’s for school, or work, or a personal submission, but regardless, you’re thrilled to present it, hoping to hear your teacher, or boss, or editor sing your praises. You’re confident in your work, and you’re certain that this time, you got it right — only to receive feedback that suggests otherwise.

If there’s any universally challenging experience that carries across all mediums and types of work, it’s learning to take criticism with grace. It’s never easy to hear that your work is subpar or that it failed to meet certain expectations, and, particularly in creative fields, it’s difficult to take constant criticism with a level head. However, whether we like it or not, criticism is a natural and necessary part of creating. It’s only through feedback — both positive and negative — that we can improve our skills.

But how do we learn to better handle criticism?

Keep in mind that it’s not something that happens over night. It takes time and practice to unpack our personal biases and insecurities. We have to put the effort in, and as we attempt to better equip ourselves to take feedback in stride, it’s important to keep a few key things in mind.

It’s nothing personal.

We all know that feeling: you receive some negative feedback, and it suddenly feels like you’ve been punched, as if the person giving the criticism was not critiquing your work, but you, personally.

It’s rare that this is the case. More likely, we struggle to allow our work to stand on its own and instead see it as an extension of ourselves; in some ways, it is, but just as we as people aren’t perfect, our work isn’t impervious to needing improvement. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been writing for two weeks or twenty years; everyone slips up on occasion. Everyone needs to be corrected from time to time, and there is no escaping that fact.

It isn’t unusual to feel hurt by negative feedback, but understand that as you move forward with your work, there’s going to be a lot more of it, and getting personally offended each and every time you receive it is only going to hinder your progress.

Remember that it’s not you vs. the critic in this instance; it’s the two of you vs. your mistakes.

Embrace insecurity, swallow the ego.

An important part of learning to take criticism is recognizing why doing so is difficult for you.

Personally, I grew up convinced that my self-worth and value as a person were directly tied to how well I performed in my work. Thus, I developed an unhealthy relationship with criticism, and any time I was criticized, my motivation was completely debilitated by insecurity and doubt. If I wasn’t good at something immediately, I was wont to give up on it.

For others, the issue might be that they’ve been praised for a particular skill their entire lives, and being told that they aren’t as skilled as they thought they were is damaging and confusing. That sense of being ‘less than’ might be unfamiliar to them in some ways, and therefore they haven’t developed a natural response to that feeling yet. This makes them more likely to react defensively or simply refuse to accept the feedback they’ve been given.

I experienced a little of this, too. I wasn’t good at many things, but I always felt that writing was my thing. I was certain it was the one skill I excelled at, and because some previous teachers praised me for it, I was dumbfounded when my eleventh grade English teacher circled huge chunks of my essays that needed fixing. Initially, my ego insisted that maybe she was wrong; when I realized she was right, I switched to my other unhealthy response, in which I berated myself for not “being good enough.”

Whether you’re insecure and struggle to detach your worth from your work or you have trouble reigning in your own ego, it’s important to identify when and why you might respond negatively to criticism and develop a contingency plan.

You could continue to beat yourself up for every little mistake or berate anyone who dares to critique you, or you could try to change your thinking.

Instead of, “I’m terrible at this,” think, “In what ways can I improve?”

Instead of, “They just don’t understand my work,” ask yourself, “What other perspectives haven’t I considered here?”

Not, “They’re attacking me personally,” but, “They’re critiquing my work, which is a natural part of the creative process.”

Not, “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” but, “How can I better understand the criticism I’ve been given and apply it to my next go ‘round?”

When it comes to taking criticism well, it’s all about your mindset and how you approach feedback.

You have nowhere to go but up…

As much as we’d all love to be a Mary Shelley or a Brandon Sanderson right out of the gate, most of us have much work to do before we get there, and as I said, even they have made mistakes.

There’s no such thing as a perfect writer. There will be elements of storytelling you excel at and others that are, in your hands, lacking — and that’s okay. How are you supposed to right those mistakes if they’re never pointed out to you? You won’t. You can’t assess a problem that you don’t know is there, and it’s often difficult to find mistakes in our own writing given our obvious bias.

It’s hard to be objective when reviewing our own work, which is why we need others to do it for us. We need outside eyes to find the things we missed, because if we’re never forced to face our errors, they’ll remain errors, and our writing will never progress.

If you feel defeated or attacked by feedback you receive, try to remember that it’s not a value judgment of your writing; it’s an opportunity to improve.

…but you’ll go nowhere sitting still.

Though we all hate to hear it, the truth is there is no shortcut to becoming a better writer.

There’s no well kept secret to discover the true paths of least resistance. To become the writer you want to be, you have to work for it. You have to put in the effort to learn your craft. You have to be able to take criticism, because being reminded that we’re not the universe’s gift to the literary world is a humbling and educational experience that we’ll all have time and time again, and we need it.

This isn’t to say that all criticism you receive will be equal, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you should take every ounce of feedback at face value. However, closing yourself off to critics will only hurt your progress.

Listen to what others have to say. Consider what you can do better and put forth the energy to improve. No matter where you are in your writing journey, the question isn’t whether or not you can get better. It’s whether or not you’re willing to step out of your comfort zone to do so.