How To Take Criticism And Improve As A Writer
Overview
Criticism sucks doesn't it? There’s nothing worse than sending off your brand new novel and expecting people to love it and say that it's the best thing they've ever read only for them to burst your bubble with a few pointed barbs of criticism, or even to say that it is rubbish and an outright disgrace to modern literature. Unfortunately though for the modern writer, criticism is as likely as the tide coming in - everyone gets it - even great whales like J.K Rowling, Stephen King and George R.R Martin get panned at times, never mind a few insignificant crustaceans like ourselves. How can we deal with it, indeed should we deal with it at all? The answer to that question is both yes and no, because it depends partly on the nature and validity of the criticism and on the writers themselves. What one writer sees as good advice maybe deemed utter nonsense by another and vice versa. As such, I have divided the criticism writers receive into three distinct types so you maybe better placed to make an accurate decision on whether to accept it or not.
If you like what I have to say about writing, feel free to check out my poetry collection on life in modern China:
Type One
The first type of criticism is the kind that we can reject out of hand straight away. This can be because the criticism is vitriolic in nature (and by implication uninformed), or because their comments fail to make an impression on you in any way. Take for example, my debut novel Jack Strong and the Red Giant, which features a super-duper spaceship millions, even billions of years more advanced than anything we have today. I showed one of the early chapters to a friend of a friend, and in his opinion the spaceship should have been less advanced, less sleek, and more chunky and blocky, like many of the spaceships depicted in TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. I rejected his criticism straight away, not because his vision of spaceships had no validity, but because that was not the story I wanted to tell. If my spaceships were more akin to those in Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars then it would've inevitably changed vital aspects of my story that I thought important to the plot, such as it being able to fly across the universe in just a few seconds. Another good example would be when somebody criticised the start of Jack Strong and the Red Giant and suggested that I remove the scene where Jack has lost a pen fight and has pen marks all over his face. They thought that I was telling too much to the reader too early. Aside from the fact that I felt strongly about the scene in question, ALL of the people (including a professor of Children's Writing no less) who had read the first chapter loved that scene and thought that it grabbed the reader's attention and set up the character nicely. So of course there was no way that I could ever take their criticism on board. This also highlights the benefit of sending your manuscript out to multiple beta readers, rather than relying on one single viewpoint. Many eyes are infinitely better than one.
If you like what I have to say about writing, why not check out my podcast 'What! The Heys' where I take weekly deep dives in the worlds of writing and literature:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1021147
Type Two
The second kind of criticism is the exact opposite of the first type: this is the stuff that we can accept straight away, nodding our heads as our critics impart good, sound advice. Usually, but not always, this concerns the technique and the framework of the story and tends to centre around spelling, grammar, punctuation, repetition of words and/or plot/description, as well as the over use of adverbs, adjectives, and exclamation marks (this alone deserves a whole other blog entry). A few years ago I started an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Early on in the course, the professor rather pointedly said that the poem I'd submitted to a workshop was 'telling' too much and that "poems today tend to utilise the pen like a lens. Your poems often employ widescreen, but I also want you to 'zoom in' and tell the reader what colour hair they have, what they are wearing etc". None of my poems were written like that. I was dumbfounded. Up until that moment I thought that my poems were the best thing since sliced bread (doesn’t everyone?) and were exactly what the literary world needed. Hearing pretty much the opposite was hard to take, but I took it on board nonetheless - why? Because I knew that deep down if I followed his advice that I could write better, more publishable poems. This was what I wanted more than anything else. The alternative was to continue to get rejected by all the magazines I’d been sending my poems to.
Type Three:
This is the hardest type of criticism to take because when we initially receive it it feels more like type one. We want to reject it straight away, to laugh at it out loud, and to toss it from our minds like cheap garbage. Only we can't, and as days and even weeks and months pass we begin to dwell upon what was said and mull it over more thoughtfully, until at some point we begin to incorporate the criticism into our work, if not wholly, then at least partly. We may hate that the person responsible was right, but ultimately we will embrace it nonetheless. Why? Because we are ambitious writers and we want to get better so that one day in the future it may be us dolling out the advice, us with our six figure publishing contracts, us with our books selling like hotcakes. I clearly remember one of my tutors at Manchester Metropolitan University telling me that I was using far too many adjectives in my poems. I was indignant and I rejected it out of hand. I was after all writing about modern Chinese cities, with all the pollution and traffic and dirt and sludge swilling about the streets, so I felt the need to describe these often hellish scenes in my poems, often cramming in as many adjectives as possible. The problem with this is that firstly sometimes less is more, such as by the simple effective use of colour or smell, and that secondly it interrupted the narrative that I was trying to tell. Eventually, at least in part (I still think that adjectives are an under-used commodity in modern poetry), I came around to their way of thinking and I now make greater effort to justify all of the adjectives that I employ. Ultimately, this has also had a lasting effect upon my novel writing too, with a lot of the over-description that was present in the first few Jack Strong chapters now residing in the reject file.
If you want to check out my novel - Jack Strong and the Red Giant - about a 12 year old boy's adventures on a spaceship check out the link below:
Final Word
At the end of the day, you have to decide which of these three categories applies to you and then process the criticism accordingly. But just because one person puts one piece of criticism in type one or type three doesn't mean you have to. We are all individuals and that is what makes our our stories so unique. Warning sirens should however be sounding in your head if you are either rejecting 100% of the criticism you receive or accepting it blindly. If you listen and apply all of the prods, suggestions, and pushes that you receive you will likely end up twisting your novel beyond all recognition and thus in the long run satisfy nobody. On the other hand if you reject every nugget of criticism that comes your way then you will in all likelihood become so entrenched in your opinions and writing methods that you will cease to view your project in the eyes of the reader. Ultimately, through a mixture of constant writing, reading, and editing, we have to develop the critic within ourselves, thus giving us the knowledge and vision to decide which piece of criticism belongs in which category, and this in the end will hopefully ensure our novel’s success.
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