Q&A: How do you deal with criticism?

It is the way of most art—a piece of writ­ing, movie, paint­ing, dance, etc., etc.—that it is gen­er­al­ly cre­at­ed to be expe­ri­enced by oth­ers, and in so doing expos­es itself to both pub­lic praise and crit­i­cism. That is inher­ent­ly part of the art-mak­ing process. More­over, this crit­i­cal response comes to the artist, for the most part, by peo­ple you don’t know, and will nev­er know. It is imper­son­al. These crit­ics have lit­tle or no knowl­edge of how you cre­at­ed your art, why you did so, how long or how hard you worked to cre­ate it. Per­haps that’s how it should be: the art is expe­ri­enced by how it is received. It is sim­ply (more or less) liked or not liked.

When I first began to pub­lish, crit­i­cal respons­es (favor­able and unfa­vor­able) came from pro­fes­sion­al crit­ics in jour­nals, mag­a­zines, and news­pa­pers. Nowa­days, because of the inter­net, crit­i­cism comes from every­where. More­over, it has become the nature of inter­net crit­i­cism, (not just in the world of art) that peo­ple feel free to say any­thing, from lav­ish praise to dis­mis­sive insult. It can be wild­ly sup­port­ive, or blunt­ly cru­el. I’ve expe­ri­enced both.

(I’ve some­times won­dered when I read a very caus­tic neg­a­tive review [not nec­es­sar­i­ly for one of my books] how the review­er would like his or her work being reviewed by a casu­al passerby.)

One of the things that peo­ple do not ful­ly grasp is that art—in what­ev­er form—is rarely cre­at­ed by just one per­son. Next time you go to a movie, hang around and watch the final credits—the list­ing of the many, many peo­ple who were engaged in the mak­ing of the film. It is not so dif­fer­ent from the mak­ing of a book. A pub­lish­er once told me that she esti­mat­ed that some forty peo­ple have a hand in each pub­lished book. But pub­lished books of fic­tion, unless there are ful­some acknowl­edge­ments, rarely list all the peo­ple involved.

Yet crit­i­cism of a book is almost whol­ly aimed at the pre­sump­tive sole author of the book.

The ques­tion post­ed here is how do I respond to that crit­i­cism? If it’s pos­i­tive, one can smile, and think “That’s nice. Thank you.” More­over, a pos­i­tive review helps sell the book, and blunt­ly, that’s how I make my living.

Neg­a­tive crit­i­cism is much hard­er to absorb. But what I have learned is if—in the pub­lic criticism—a fair num­ber of folks say the same thing, it is prob­a­bly accu­rate. This is to say, the best crit­i­cism allows you to learn and get bet­ter at your art. That’s hard to do, but ulti­mate­ly, nec­es­sary. That means a neg­a­tive response can be much more help­ful than a pure­ly pos­i­tive critique.

But the insult­ing, or dis­mis­sive respons­es can be very painful for the artist.

Many years ago a book of mine was pub­lished in Eng­land. The book—meant to be funny—had a line that involved base­ball. Since base­ball is not played in Eng­land, the Eng­lish edi­tor changed that base­ball line to one that ref­er­enced soc­cer. When that book was reviewed in Eng­land, a crit­ic who did not like it, quot­ed that very line to indi­cate why he thought my book was weak. And when True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle was pub­lished, one review­er indi­cat­ed that “If writer and edi­tor had worked hard­er it would have been a bet­ter book.”

So the essen­tial answer to this ques­tion is that I have learned to live with what is made of my work. If I can learn from it, great. If it’s insult­ing, well, I don’t so much turn the oth­er cheek, I turn anoth­er page.