The craft of criticism

Emi­ly, from West New­bury, Mass, writes:  “I was won­der­ing how you feel about neg­a­tive criticism.”

It is hard not to feel bad when you get neg­a­tive crit­i­cism. I think the hard­est part is when you have an inkling that the crit­ic might be right. How­ev­er, well-writ­ten, thought­ful crit­i­cism can also help you write bet­ter. You must try not to be defen­sive. You must try not to take it per­son­al­ly. There is a skill in writ­ing good crit­i­cism. If you as a writer wish to be respect­ed, you must respect the craft of crit­i­cism. More often than not, the crit­i­cism is not aimed at the writer, but at a pos­si­ble reader.

The hard­est crit­i­cism to deal with is when the crit­ic goes after you in per­son­al terms. I can recall a review­er com­ment­ing (neg­a­tive­ly) about my pho­to­graph on the back of a book. Once, some­one pub­lished an arti­cle about me that was titled, “Review­ing Avi.” Anoth­er review­er wrote, com­ment­ing upon a state­ment I made—in a preface—about the writ­ing of the book, “I don’t believe him.”

These days the most dif­fi­cult crit­i­cism to accept comes from casu­al, dis­mis­sive crit­ics who write in blogs. Not every book is good. Far from it. Not every writer writes well. Far from it.

Nev­er­the­less, vir­tu­al­ly all writ­ers, I do believe, work hard at what they do. They deserve, I think, some mea­sure of respect. Some­times, such crit­ics think the writer has no feel­ings worth respecting.

All that said, if you are a writer, and you make your work avail­able to the pub­lic, you have to accept the fact that there is going to be crit­i­cism. I hope that it will be pos­i­tive. Just know there is insight­ful, use­ful, and well-writ­ten crit­i­cism as well as that which is not—and learn how to tell the difference.