The Five Steps of Surviving Critique
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing stories, it’s that it is really hard to start but even harder to have it seen by others. Now, I’ve come to recognize different kinds of anxiety in their respective situations. You have your test anxiety, your anxiety before presenting your PowerPoint, your anxiety from stalking your crush on social media and then accidentally liking a picture, and many more. But in my experience, nothing compares to the feeling of intense panic and concern from getting your work exposed and critiqued by your peers.
Obviously, not all writers are like this. Some of them are assured by their writing skills and have a built-in, unshakeable confidence where their souls should be. But the rest of us aren’t privileged with such advantages. No, we hold and nourish our stories like they’re our newborn babies. You have to fight us for even a three-second glance at them. We won’t even tell you the name and only refer to them as “my story” or “this thing I wrote” with the vaguest details just so we could protect them from the smallest judgements. Even when we eventually open up to showcasing our work, we still have a protective grip on it and a thousand concerning thoughts swimming around in our heads. Is my story interesting? Did I leave any plot holes? Are the characters dynamic and relatable? Do they like it?
Fortunately, over time, I found a way to ease my anxiety when getting a story of mine workshopped, and in just five steps. However, while I use these steps from my perspective as a writer, it can still be applied to other critiqued works as well.
Read/Listen. Regardless of if the feedback of my work is negative or positive, I make sure to take in any kind of response that my work elicited from others. By doing this, I get to see how it was perceived on the surface level. It’s simply an indication of whether or not my work was well received.
Feel. Based on the responses, I give in to all the emotions I experienced in exposing myself to the perceptions of my work. I let myself feel proud if someone really liked a specific part, and I let myself feel defensive if someone didn’t understand something I thought was clear.
Detach. Once I let myself get into my feelings, I pull an Elsa and just let it all go. This step, for me, is the most difficult and possibly the longest out of the five. I find it easily manageable when the work is being critiqued electronically or I’m going over written comments. In that case, I have more time to sort through my feelings about my critiques. If it’s in person, I usually stay quiet and just emote inside my head. As you might imagine, there’s usually a lot of internal screaming.
Understand. After going through an emotional rollercoaster, I focus on the suggestions given to me during my critique. I try to understand the perspective of my critic and attempt to see what they believe needs improvement in my work. This step is also to remind me that these critiques and suggestions are not personal attacks on me as an artist (in my case, a writer).
Breathe. The easiest step. I relax and allow everything to flow and fall into place.
To this day, I find myself going back to these steps whenever I get my writing workshopped. It’s helped me a lot in growing as a writer and as a person. And, like I said before, these steps can be applied to more than just writers and can work for other creators as well. Creators will always be subjugated to criticism—that’s just a fact. But I think that while we should be prepared for critiques, good and bad, we should also know how to protect ourselves and understand that these criticisms do not devalue our identities as artists. It makes us stronger because it makes us aware of how we hold our pens or brushes and reminds us why we create these works in the first place.
