Criticism Week Day Two: Coping well with criticism is one of the most important writing skills you will ever learn.

A few weeks ago I endured an awful call from an agent in Germany. I’d written a series of features that were clumsy and full of clutter last winter when I was ill. They’d dug up those writings and needed to address the quality of the work. This is going to happen to you. It happens to all of us. There are two ways to respond to a call like this:

a) By insisting you’ve been in the industry for 30 years, and your agent is simply wrong.
b) By listening and absorbing the feedback so you can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Only one of those responses will benefit you, and it’s not the first.

I’m capable of responding well to criticism because I began learning in a workshop environment. My years of feedback in that learning space taught me how to treat criticism as a bonus feature rather than an attack. Criticism can hurt. If you’re hoping to be a professional one day, you will need to learn how to cope with that kind of pain. As a working writer, editors are going to pull you to pieces at times. This is necessary because nobody has the time to handle you lightly. There are deadlines to meet and work to do, so you have to simply learn to be a grown-up about it.

Much as I hate to hurt people, I know all too well that handling you delicately will not help your career or your writing. Coping well with criticism is one of the most important writing skills you will ever learn. When it hurts, treat it as a lesson. That pain will benefit you. It will make you teachable and, more importantly, it will prepare you for your relationships with editors. It will prepare you for the many rejections in your future and the occasional mean letter from publishers.

Professional writing can be tough. It’s okay. If you keep showing up on the page after a painful critique, you will become infinitely better at navigating the industry.