Storytellersunplugged

Let’s talk about the bad news.

And by bad news, I mean getting a negative response to something you’ve written. It may be a bad review. It may be a reader slagging the book on Amazon.com or on a message board. It may be a critique from a professional peer or agent or member of your writing group that leaves your manuscript bloodier than Caesar at the end of act IV. In the end, it’s someone responding to your writing with less than love and lollipops, and that can be hard to deal with. After all, by writing you’re exposing yourself. You’re putting part of yourself out there where you can’t defend and explain every little nuance, and inevitably someone’s not going to like it. And if they don’t like it, then they don’t like that part of you that’s out there, and, well, we can all see where that line of thinking goes.

Except, of course, that it is at least one part hogwash. Any writer who is actually going to write (as opposed to being one of those chowderheads who simply likes calling themselves a writer without bothering with the actual, you know, writing part of the equation) is going to have to be able to deal with negative feedback. If you can’t, then you’re simply not going to last as a writer. If you can’t take and use criticism, then either you won’t improve or you’ll be destroyed by it. Either way, you’re not doing yourself, your writing or your readers any good.

This is both more and less obvious than it sounds. On one hand, dealing with negative feedback is more than just being able to go on once someone says they don’t like your writing. It’s examining what they actually said and why they said it, and sifting through it with the intention of extracting useful tidbits that you can apply to the next iteration, taking it as information and not as a comment on your worth as a human being. Data is useful, an ad hominem is not, and being able to view even the most savage critique as the former is a vital survival technique in the bloodthirsty world of manuscript notes and online forums.

On the other hand, it seems only sensible, intellectually speaking, to be able to take a less-than-breathily-erotic commentary on your work and move on without having an aneurysm or swearing a thousand-year feud on the commenter in question. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of people who tend to lose their distanced savoir faire about other people staying cool with negative reviews as soon as its their own literary ox that gets the shish kebab treatment. The same reviewer who’s being incisive on your buddy’s book is suddenly a mouth-breathing, subliterate Reptoid when he points out what he thinks is lacking in yours. A fellow member of your critique group is just jealous because you didn’t give his manuscript a tongue bath at last week’s session, and is getting back by vindictively trashing your perfect prose. That writing professor whom last week you idolized is out to get you this week, and with a vengeance. You get the idea, or at least I hope you do. If you’re sitting there with your hair on fire, shouting “I’m not like that!”, then maybe you need to take a break before reading the rest of this.

There are, in my experience, a few standard responses to the negative. The first is simply to brazen it out and ignore whatever the feedback might say. This is the “What the @#$@## do they know?” response, and it usually comes with a lengthy vilification of the individual offering the less-than-positive response, their skills, talent, ancestry, and willingness to be caught on videotape nude with any number of nontraditional species of livestock. Then they keep on keeping on, doing the same things that got them the critique in the first place and improving only slowly, if at all.

The second is the complete inverse. Any negative feedback stops this individual in their tracks, momentarily and perhaps forever. Maybe the imperfect feedback – and make no mistake, sometimes anything less than “It’s brilliant. Don’t change a word” gets read as negative – is the excuse that individual has been looking for to lay down the burden of writing. Sometimes they’re so insecure in what they’re doing, or so gobsmacked by the idea that someone wouldn’t utterly love every letter they committed to paper that their entire creative process comes to a screeching halt. Maybe they just don’t know what to do with it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They stop writing, for a while or forever.

Reaction number three is the one I was prone to, at least in my younger years. It can be summed up as “Oh yeah, I’ll show you,” and generally results in a massive frenzy of writing directed entirely at proving the critiquer in question wrong, wrong, wrong. The writer will do pretty much everything but the commenter’s suggestions in an attempt to improve their writing. Sometimes this works; sometimes it produces a lot of wasted time and effort, and sometimes it just sort of sends you spiraling off into the outer darkness. While someone doing an “Oh, yeah?” isn’t reflecting the idea of critical feedback, they’re rejecting the specific feedback they’ve gotten out of hand. It’s a good thing that they’re willing to accept the notion of valuable critique, at least as a theoretical construct, but the living-breathing example in front of them gets rejected out of hand because, well, it was put down in front of them.

Ultimately, I think best response, and the place that you have to get to is to judge feedback as feedback, not as counters on an absolute scale of “He loves my writing/He loves my writing not”. Each one needs to be judged based on where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to say, and if it affords something useful for making the writing better. If it’s critique of a project in progress, you don’t automatically have to kow-tow to every suggestion every reader you have makes. You just have to weigh them dispassionately on their own merits, and with an eye as to whether following them up will make the project better. Maybe they won’t, but the idea they spark in you will, Maybe they will in fact do the trick. Or maybe they won’t help you get where you think the book needs to go, but you can at least appreciate the effort and thought that went into them. It’s entirely possible that the thought and effort might add up to zero, and you’re right in ultimately dismissing them – I’m reminded of one gent who complained in an Amazon review that it was confusing to read book 2 of my fantasy trilogy if you didn’t bother to read book 1 – but there’s also the possibility that there’s something in there that you can put to good use, now or down the road.

As you might have guessed, that’s the position I’ve come around to. At this point in my career, I love pointed feedback, because getting it early means I’m less likely to get it late. Reader response on a manuscript or story that can be summed up as “I liked it” may provide a minute of egoboo, but it doesn’t help me improve the story. It doesn’t help point out that one moment where a character’s motivation gets shaky, or the plot hole that I’ve subconsciously been tap dancing around for the last six drafts. I’m a big boy now, and I can take harsh language in the interest of getting other eyes on stuff that I know too well. That doesn’t mean that I want to deal with pointless ranting, or rudeness, or anything of that ilk, but mainly because that doesn’t make the writing better.

So my advice is to learn to love the bad news, or at least, to live with it. You never know. It might grow on you.