The Art of Receiving Criticism

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.” –David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

I’d like to share a secret with you: I hate receiving critique. I hate it so much, when I first start writing, I refused to even participate in critique. In workshops, I sat silent while disdainfully making excuses for each person’s opinion in my mind: She writes young adult books and this is an experimental piece, so she won’t get it. His writing is not that great, how can he give me any feedback that’s helpful?

Many writers are never taught how to receive critique. We should be.

My behavior makes me sound like a total jerk, but the truth was, the idea of changing a story terrified me. I was fine with giving feedback, sure, but when it came time for me to receive, I froze. I said nothing. I took my fellow writer’s comments on my printed manuscripts home and shoved them in a drawer. At one point I left a workshop in tears. I remember walking to my snow-dusted car, sitting in the freezing cold without turning the heater on, and telling myself how wrong I was to try to become a writer.

When I first started out writing, stories were not living, breathing things. They were SET IN STONE, unchangeable facts. “But this is what happened,” I told myself. That’s how the…