Responding to critique: the emotional part con't.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

OK, I hope you weren’t waiting with bated breath or anything, because I don’t really have any gimmicky trick that will help you accept criticism gracefully other than this piece of common sense advice: let some time pass.

Time is the best way to silence the defensive voice in your head. If you’re getting oral feedback from your reader, don’t interrupt. Let your reader talk, and take copious notes. Set the notes aside for awhile till the negative comments lose their sting and you can really digest them.

Time is the key to being able to evaluate your writing objectively. More experienced writers tend to have more callouses built up than beginners. That’s part of what I mean. But each new piece of writing needs a little time to breathe too. When the ink on the page is still wet and you’re feeling euphoric about what you’ve just written down, that’s not the time to call in your reader for a critique. Wait a day or a week or a month—however long it takes for you to achieve that slightly detached, cold-light-of-dawn perspective.

Time also gives you a chance to do some solo revising. Rough drafts are meant to be rough. You aren’t worried about perfection; you just want to get the words flowing. And that’s the way it should be. Your work has its own life cycle, and before you show your newborn to even one other person, you might want to clean it up a little and throw a diaper on it.

In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about failure as an integral part of any creative endeavor. She distinguishes between private and public failures, saying the more you fail in private, the less likely you’ll be to fail in public (which of course is much more painful and embarrassing). The more you edit your work alone, the fewer mistakes your reader will find. In turn, the more help you can get from a reader before sending your work to an even greater public, the greater your chances for success.