Dealing With Criticism (Newly Self-published)

You're absolutely right and I actually spent the better part of three hours yesterday rewriting a couple short stories for that very reason. I had a trusted beta reader tell me she didn't understand the motivation of my main character and as soon as she said it, I realized she was exactly right. I didn't write a convincing motivation. Now I've rewritten it, and the story has improved by leaps and bounds.

Speaking of betas. I wish I had a beta reader who was a writer as well. The people that read my work are not writers and while they provide good feedback, I wish I had a deeper critique sometimes.

 

I just had a wonderful experience with a beta reader, so I would love to offer the same. Send me a message if you have something you'd like me to read.

 

First, critiques and reviews seem to be used interchangeably sometimes but they are really two different things. Critiques are requested by you, to help polish your work privately, before it's published. Reviews are intended for other readers who are deciding if they should buy your book. They are permanent and public. I'd much rather get my feedback privately (or semi-privately, anyway) when I still had a chance to improve it. Submitting/publishing too soon is tempting in the moment but really not a good idea. But it seems you already know that now, so...

If you get a decent number of reviews on your published work, you're sure to get some that are unfair and inaccurate. I got a one-star review recently because the buyer couldn't get it to download on their Kindle, as if I have anything to do with that. Not to mention that they had actually bought a print copy in the first place, not even an e-book, so wtf.

I've gotten a couple that seemed so weirdly venomous that I tried to think who I'd pissed off lately who knew my pen name haha. Sometimes they state things that would be easy to prove false. I got one that said there was no appendix in the back, for example, which was just clearly incorrect. I got another one that was about a different book by a different author and apparently not a very good one.

I wouldn't stop writing over it but it will probably always annoy me, at a minimum. Skin gets toughened but it doesn't turn to armor. Most of it is their opinion which is fair enough, though. The thing to remember is NEVER answer them! It looks amateurish and it's all to easy to end up entertaining the entire internet with a giant public meltdown. Good luck.

 

My take on the critiquing issue brought up earlier- I've very rarely seen writing full of SPAG errors that actually was very good otherwise. Once in a great while you run into a true natural storyteller but, in general, good fiction writing takes a lot of hard-earned skill. And SPAG is so basic that it's just not very likely they could do poorly on that and do well on the stuff that takes much more skill.

Personally, I usually pass by those who tell me what they "only" want suggestions on. If they actually knew what was right and wrong about their work that well, they'd have no need for critiques in the first place. The whole point of it is for others to point out what the writer didn't get. Obviously, if they knew what that was then they would have gotten it. So it signals to me someone who is likely difficult to work with.

If they say something like it's just a general idea so a line-by-line critique isn't needed, that's different because it seems like they're being considerate of the critiquers' time rather than being a special snowflake. Other than that, why bother with someone who doesn't want to hear my take on it, which means whatever *I* see that I think could be improved on and however *I* think it works best to show them (aside from abuse or sarcasm of course but most of us wouldn't do that anyway).

The satisfaction in critiquing to me is to help polish work and make it better and hopefully, publishable. If the writer needlessly limits achieving that goal, I'd rather help someone else.

 

I completely agree that critique and reviews are different, though I do believe that you can also choose how you take them I actually published my first story before getting critique, so the first published version was horrible. I can't really say I regret it though. I chose a story that my heart was not really in, so that I could see how I would take criticism. And some grammatical and punctuation errors have now been corrected, but I can't say that I believe I could have made it much better. So if I'd chosen to get critique first, I think I'd never been satisfied. However, one person gave it a 5-star review (my only review from my whole 26 readers), so one person must have enjoyed it, and I let it stay published. It's different with the story I am writing now. My heart's very much in it, and I will give it the time it needs.

It's interesting that you mention that skin gets toughened because whereas I believe it's true, I am not always sure that I like it because as writers, I feel that we need to feel all we can to write the best characters.

 

I think writers can benefit from a mix of sensitivity and detachment. If you're TOO sensitive, you can't really write--you just feel. But if you can have the feelings and then step away from them, examine them from inside and out, and decide how to use them? I think that's where powerful writing can come from.

In terms of critiques and reviews? I rarely ask for critiques anymore, but I'm fine with a few negative reviews - goes with the territory.

 

Oh yeah, I think we need both. Or all kind of writers, really. I know I am (slightly) contradicting what I said in my prior post, but I find it sad when we give boxes as to how a creative person should be. To me, that just limits our world and we'll all suffer the loss. That being said, I don't think that being too sensitive (I guess whether there's is such a thing depends on the person you ask) necessarily means that you can't write.

I don't think I would mind either. Actually, I kind of thought it might be most efficient to have either very good or very bad reviews rather than average reviews.