But so many of us are willing to put our work into major surgery at the first sign that someone doesn't love it as much as we do... and we honestly need to stop that.
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| Seriously, you made it, stand by it! |
Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! To be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
Lastly, make sure you check out my Vocal archive for several hundred other articles about geek ephemera, weird history, writing, and more!
Criticism is Everywhere (Don't Take It All Home With You)
If you're a creator, then you're going to get criticism. Art is completely subjective, and even if you have experience, talent, skill, a unique idea, and you polish it to a mirror shine, there's always going to be someone who tells you your work is shit. Sometimes they'll elaborate, and tell you all the things they didn't like about it. Sometimes they'll just yell obscenities in text, and give you a 1 star rating.
There are, however, a few important things you should ask yourself when criticism comes your way. Some of these include:
- Is It Specific?: Anyone can say your book sucks, or they hate your work... but do they know anything about it, or are they just shouting about something they haven't even read?
- Is It In Bounds?: If someone criticizes your book about vampires in a submarine for getting submarine physics and names wrong, that's fair. If they're mad your vampires don't work the same as vampires in a different series, less so.
- Is It In Good Faith?: This can be hard to tell at a glance, but there's a lot of bad faith criticism out there. Learning to recognize this helps a great deal, because people who aren't engaging with you in good faith aren't people you should pay attention to.
Perhaps the most important question you should ask yourself, though, is whether the person offering you criticism is a person you trust. Do you know their bona fides, and do their words carry weight with you? Or are they just some random person who has decided you need to hear their opinion about your work?
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| You don't know me, but let me tell you all about why you're shit. |
You should, generally speaking, be polite to people whenever you can. However, if the criticism is coming from people who aren't in your audience, and who don't have any experience with telling stories or writing books, it's okay not to take their words to heart.
If someone who only reads sci fi doesn't like your sword and sorcery novel, why do you care? They've just told you they aren't in your target audience. If someone tells you they aren't a writer, but then they try to tell you how to write, isn't that like someone with zero knowledge about cars telling their mechanic what to do? It seems obvious, but we often let criticism right past our front gates, and it can make us second-guess so much of our work, and try to change it to satisfy the maximum number of people.
You're never really immune to this, either.
Consider this audio version of my short story Gav and Bob, Part 5: Faith and Martyrs. Going through the comments, there are a lot of folks who really liked it. Some commenters said it made them cry, while others were excited to hear what became of Gav and the other characters afterward. But out of those 731 comments, there were a few who dissented. Some folks claimed this was just fan service, and it was a pointless addition to the story. Some thought it should have had more action, or focused more on Gav and the others fighting the Emperor's foes as they had in previous chapters/installments. However, I made myself back up, and really look at the totality of what I was facing.
In addition to those 731 comments (a few of which were negative), there were 4.3 thousand upvotes on this video! Not only that, but at time of writing it's got over 59,000 views, which for something that involves my work is pretty impressive overall.
Taking the metrics as a whole, that's a pretty overwhelmingly positive response to the story... but even with that many people and factors in favor of the thing I made, the few objections and criticisms still got through. And I had to remind myself that with that many people clearly enjoying the thing I made, I should try to focus on the approval rather than the dissenting voices. Especially since none of those voices came from people who'd written for the Black Library, or even other prominent 40K fan channels. They were just a handful of folks out of thousands who didn't like what I'd made.
And that's just the cost of doing of business.
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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!
That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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