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 story ends. I wrote it that way on purpose.

But all writing starts with intent, right? We want to tell a certain story, a specific image pops into our minds and we need to describe it, even if we don’t know where the story will end when we start writing. Even if we’re just practicing, we’re still being intentional. Read a Flannery O’Conner story and try to tell me that every word, every action, every moment isn’t crafted by a steady hand. Inspiration often feels like we’ve been struck by lightning, but true craft holds meaning beyond the first moment of idea to paper. So no matter how much I told myself that this was my creative process and revision wasn’t necessary for me, dear reader, it was a lie.

Many writers are never taught how to receive critique, and even worse, how to ask for the critique we need. We should be. We’re taught, by fellow writers and teachers, that giving critique means the sandwich method: good, bad, good…