Criticism and the Writer

by Jewel Leann Williams

Unless you are writing a journal entry, or a secret document you never intend the world to see, you will endure criticism. Anyone who reads your book, poem, short story, or blog entry, will have thoughts about it, whether they express them or not.

Your words will resonate with them--or they won't.

Your characters, the setting, your pacing--all of those things will either engage them, or they won't.

So, why not get some good, solid criticism before you let your words go public, so that you can change those things that need to be corrected, before it's too late?

Well, because asking people whose opinion you value to possibly tell you things they don't like about this thing you've been pouring your soul into, is absolutely frightening, that's why!

Many writers are so terrified to hear that their "baby" is actually really ugly, that they don't ever present to critique groups or beta readers.

What's worse, some writers are so invested in their project that even if they do have beta readers, when those readers outline all the things that are wrong with the book, the writer has a meltdown. Sometimes they go on Facebook to get validation and commiseration, they may discount the criticism, or possibly take it so much to heart that they don't touch the project again.

These things ought not to be. With this in mind, I present the following steps to receiving criticism as a writer (I am talking about the kind of criticism you ASK for: critique groups, beta readers, etc.):

Step 1: Say, "Thank you."   You did, after all, ask for them to read and comment. They sacrificed time to read your project.

Step 2: get out the salt. You will need at least one grain of it to take with each comment.  You have to take into account that everyone has their own pre-established likes, dislikes, and idiosyncrasies that will color their perception of your work.

Step 3: Keep this advice from Neil Gaiman in mind:

When people say "This doesn't work for me," there is always a reason. However, the reason may be completely different than what they think it is. Pay attention to those things that are unsettling to your beta readers, but be aware that their solution is not necessarily the solution.

Step 4: Pray or meditate on it.  I believe that God wants me to use my talents as a writer to help His children.  Because of that, I also believe that He will direct me in the use of my writing, if I ask Him. That may not be your belief, but I promise if you take time to reflect on the things that your beta readers have told you, you can be more mindful of what changes you need to make and which ones are not necessary.

Step 5: Be true to yourself; true to your story.  But don't be afraid to "kill your darlings" if necessary.  IF NECESSARY. You don't have to. Sometimes one reader may not like something that may be perfectly wonderful to another. YOU get the final say.

Step 6: Do it all over again. Make changes, get feedback. Make more changes, get more feedback. Think of it as sanding furniture, or polishing a stone or a car... you refine, refine, refine, with finer grit sandpaper, until you can truly see the gem shining through.

What advice do YOU have for writers dealing with critiques? Post in the comments!

Sometimes It's Not You, It's Them

By Jewel Leann Williams

Statement heard in local American Night Writers Association chapter meeting (paraphrased):

“I’ve written a book, I pitched it, and it was accepted by XYZ publishing house. The editor had big plans, and then strangely rolled everything back and rejected it. I’ve been completely revising it and turning it into a completely different book. I guess my story didn’t have much to offer anyone.”

Let me tell you about the book this author is speaking of.  It is an inspirational memoir about her daughter and their experiences through a leukemia scare. 

I haven’t read the story, and I don’t know if it needs revision for the usual things we all have to revise, revise, revise in our stories. But one thing I can tell you, and I did tell her, is this:

OF COURSE YOUR STORY HAS SOMETHING TO OFFER!!

As a mom, I don’t have to have a child with leukemia to be inspired by another mother’s journey in that space.  I have other trials with my children and can gain insight and inspiration from what she went through.

Sometimes, it’s not YOU, it’s THEM.

Editors, publishers, agents are people. What’s worse, BUSINESS people. They have goals, agendas, business models—and each of them has a different one.  There are as many reasons for a rejection as there are rejections. 

I get it. I had a book I worked super hard on. I’d finished it, pitched it, got a “pages request” and sent it to not just the agent requesting, but every agent I could research who might be interested.  I thought it was ready, and it was rejected (a lot). It is one of the hardest things for me to pick that back up and work on it. But it’s a worthwhile project. The story is still, well, awesome, it has a great voice (says more than one of the rejectors), it just needs work. It doesn’t need the whole thing changed—just lots of polish. But man! It is HARD to put more blood, sweat, and tears into that project when my hopes had been so high, and then been smashed like a clam on a rock.

Mid nineteenth-century depiction of Josephine fainting after being told by Napoleon he will decree a divorce (to seek a male heir and royal alliance) Artist: Bosselman - Chasselat Public Domain in US (Public Domain in source country before 1996; past 75 years from artist's death)

But hear me now and believe me later (bonus if you know that reference):

Just because your book was rejected, does not mean that you need to change it into something different. What you need to do is:

1. Consider the source and the content of the rejection. Sometimes it’s more about timing, marketing, and publishing trends than it is about the story itself.  Did you pitch a self-help book to an agent who only represents fiction? Or to an agent with a full list of authors in your genre?
2. Realize that much of what is accepted and rejected depends on personal taste.  An agent or editor has to believe in your book to properly represent it. The publishing world is highly competitive for agents as well. Sometimes it just isn’t something that strikes their fancy, but there will be someone else out there who won’t be able to resist what you’re offering.
3. Did you query too soon?  This was where my eager little self went wrong. I finished a book, loved it, and like an ugly baby with a doting mother, I thought it was beautiful and perfect.  Beautiful it is, but perfect—not by far. I should have gone through some real edits, beta readers, more edits, etc. and polished it more.  Make sure that what you are presenting is the best you can make it, and that you have had feedback and critiques to help you polish your product.
4. PRAY about the feedback you receive. You have every right to ask for guidance. Don’t change things because some cranky editor who doesn’t like family stories or things that mention God or books with a happy ending (or a sad one, or one with puppies… etc. ad nauseum). Take the criticism, turn it over in your hands, consider it, and pray about it. You’ll know what needs to happen.

Here’s the thing.  I want you to remember this above all else.

Heavenly Father gave YOU the talent and desire to write. He has a purpose for blessing/cursing you with the need to express yourself with words.

He gave you that talent to bless His children.

You may not think that what you have to offer is anything special. But if you wrote it with the inspiration of our Heavenly Father, then you can rest assured that it is special and it does have something to offer the world. As such, you also need to include him in polishing your book, because just as He can transform people, He can guide you to transform your words into what He would have them be.

He will let you know what needs to happen, whether it is not to change a thing, to edit, to rework the whole thing, or to set it aside in a folder marked “Things I Wrote to Hone My Craft.” Or any myriad of other things. You just have to ask the Guy Who Really Knows.

Just remember—

Sometimes, it’s really not you, it’s them. 

Handling Criticism

by Katy White

Recently, the internet has been abuzz with the story of an author who chose to cyberstalk (then physically stalk) a reviewer whom she felt had been particularly harsh in her review. While I don't want to get into the details and, truthfully, wish I'd never heard about it in the first place, I've thought a lot about why this is resonating with the writing community so much and why I feel the way I feel about it. And in doing so, I've come to one conclusion:

I don't want to be universally loved. Not as an author. Not even as a person.

Sure, I wish I lived my life above reproach and offense (which I completely, unquestioningly do not), but even if I did that, people would still have a problem with me. The Savior lived His life perfectly. Yet look at how polarizing a figure He was and still is in our day! Even Christians view Him and His teachings differently. Heck, even Mormons do. Sometimes within our own families. All of life's beauty and heartache have agency at its center, and with agency comes different experiences and opinions.

I recently had my two best friends read my new WIP. One of them is a therapist and the other is a nurse. My therapist BFF gave me the feedback that one of the characters should be darker and consider suicide, as it was not only consistent with the character's mental illness, but it would also lead to an important revelation to my main character that would give her the growth she needed. And, in my perspective, her feedback was bang on. I made the change, and I think the story is stronger for it.

Yet my other best friend, the nurse, read the revised version and said that was the only part she had a problem with. Based on personal experiences, she has a problem reading about suicide and couldn't connect to the character as a result.

And you know what? I'm happy about that. I'm happy that she had a strong emotion about it, even if it wasn't the emotion I intended in writing the character or scenes. Because she's a human being reading her book through the lenses of her own personal experience, not mine.

Think of it this way: if everyone who reads my book responds exactly the way I want them to, that obviously means the world has been taken over by automatons who have all been created in my image.

Holy shnikes, is that ever a terrifying thought.

So the next time you write something, remember to actively hope that people react differently to it. Because otherwise, you're in a weird Doctor Who version of reality that's probably going to end with you being harvested by your own automatons for spare organs.

Or something.

Throwing Planks at Your Windows

Last weekend, I was listening to “Rosie on the House,” a home improvement radio show. They were at the Pella window factory (in Pella, Iowa!) and Rosie was squeeing like a fanboy at Comicon about all of the cool machines they use to test the strength, durability, and awesomeness of their windows. The Pella people put their product through a plethora of performance (p) evaluations, from extreme temperature ovens that subject the windows to extreme heat and cold. I won’t say what the exact temperatures are, because I don’t remember the exact ones. But it was in the “humans can’t survive this heat/cold” range—well beyond what a window should reasonably be expected to withstand. Pella has tests for “forced entry resistance” where they put pressure on the product to make sure it won’t be an easy target for burglars. Rosie’s favorite test involved a machine that hurls 2x4 planks of wood at the windows to test them for resistance to breakage.  Pella also pulls five windows off their assembly line and sends them directly to testing for performance ratings, compared with many manufacturers that pull windows, tweak and calibrate them, and then send them to the performance rating tests. The result of all the extreme testing is that Pella is considered one of the Rolls Royces of windows.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, Pella wants their windows to be the best, so they subject them to testing that borders on outrageously overdone—if the Earth ever got as cold as what they are testing their windows for, the occupants would already by dead. Winds strong enough to throw full planks of wood at windows would have already sent the whole house over the rainbow. Nevertheless, Pella knows that if it can withstand those extremes, then everything else will be easily overcome. They want to be sure that their product is the best it can be.

Are you willing to do that to your book/poem/short story/magazine article? We don’t have machines to test our writing—we have critiques and beta testers. Just like manufacturers (window, car, tire, etc.) throw their worst at their product, we should be putting our work through stringent and repeated testing to make sure it can hold up to the standards that editors, readers, reviewers will place on it.  If Pella wasn’t willing to have a few windows break in the name of quality, they shouldn’t be in the window business. If an author isn’t able to handle criticism, even blistering, scathing dislike, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the business. Think of the critiquing in your own close groups, or by family and friends) as heat or pressure testing. A beta read, on the other hand, is more like checking to see if your “window” can withstand a 2x4 at hurricane speed. You need to know if it can, before you send it to an agent.  Welcome the shattering—it means you still have time to fix your product before sending it out to the world.

So, your beta reader breaks your window—ouch. It hurts. The words you wrote came from your soul. This book is your baby—and this reader just called your baby ugly. How should you react? Well, first, don’t punch the reader in the face. You asked for a critique. Be grateful for the honesty.  Secondly, acknowledge that it hurts—but put an expiration date on the pity party. You need to give yourself permission to feel sad about the negative criticism for a few moments (or the time it takes to consume your favorite guilty pleasure treat, or a lunch with friends to commiserate). However, what you do next is what separates the amateur from the professional. Your next choice is whether you sit, with your thin skin, cradling your ego and stroking your “baby” muttering “what do they know,” and “Mommy thinks you’re just beautiful”—okay, I’m being extreme. But think about this—the energy you devote to building your ego back up, getting validation from others about your talent, focusing on how you feel, is energy that you could be spending making your book better. If the engineers at Pella spent any time at all feeling sorry for themselves when a window cracked in the oven or shattered when the board hit it, we would think they were ridiculous—just fix the product! It sounds heartless (and I need to take my own advice, trust me) but it is not about you, it’s about the writing.  A professional just gets back to work, figuring out what didn’t work, and fixing it.

I have chapters and trilogies full of thoughts about this, but you don’t have years (or patience) to read them. Here are a few:

Writing is a craft—yes, it is an art as well, but whereas an amateur relies mostly on raw talent, a professional practices the craft. Professionals are often not satisfied with their own work, because it’s not ready to withstand a hurricane yet—and amateurs think what they have created is so AWESOME that anyone with differing opinions is either mean, misinformed, or just doesn’t understand. Not all criticism is valid, but gives all of it serious consideration. As a professional, you can sift the wheat from the chaff.

A professional at anything separates themselves from their work, even as they throw everything they have into their work. The thick skin, the ability—no, the eagerness­­­­—to accept negative feedback, is a sign of true professional because they know that identifying flaws is the only way to fix flaws.

A professional never argues with criticism. The book is going to be sent out into the world defenseless, so to “yeah but” with your beta readers is pointless. If a beta reader has an issue then you can rest assured that other readers will too. Figure out the problem, and fix it.

A professional doesn’t throw the beta reader under the bus. By this I mean, that the writer shouldn’t kill the messenger, or try to make the beta reader out to be the bad guy. Even if your feelings are totally hurt, have the professionalism to leave them out of it. Getting other people to tell you that your beta reader doesn’t know what they are talking about, that your writing is amazing, blah blah blah, may make you feel better, but it doesn’t make your book better.  

Remember, it’s about the book. It’s not about you. Your book is a window—make sure it can withstand the hurricane before you send it out into the world. If someone finds flaws, fix them.

Have you had a critique that just crushed you? How did you use it to improve your craft?