It's Criticism Week!

During my first year in the writing scene, I often left my workshop in tears. I’d pinned all my hopes on success, and sometimes it seemed I’d never get there. I expected myself to get everything 100% right 100% of the time, and sometimes criticism sliced right under my skin where it really hurt. I let writing feedback reflect on my sense of self-worth, so the feedback I desperately needed also caused me a world of pain.

These days, I’m the Chuck Norris of writing feedback. You can tell me my writing is terrible, and I’ll carry on my merry way. I’ve been rejected a thousand times, and that’s okay. I know the solution: be better. Put in extra work.

This doesn’t scare me because I’ve learned that extra work actually works. I don’t know if I’ll ever be good enough to appear on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, but I’m damned well going to try. If I never reach my comedy goals, that’s okay. We can’t all be geniuses, but we should all have ambition. Otherwise, we’ll never get anywhere.

Back when I was a 20-something wannabe, I pinned my entire self-worth on my writing. It wasn’t enough to be good, though. I had to be The Very Best™. I had to be published in Faber and Faber or I deemed myself worthless as a writer.

Hell, maybe one day Faber and Faber will deem me worthy of a rejection letter, but now I know that the best poetry publisher in my own country wants my work. Success comes in layers, and we don’t all win the big prizes. You’ve got to shoot for them, though, because otherwise you never grow.

Writing is a massive industry. There are 50,000 published fiction writers in the USA alone. There are millions of published writers across the world. It’s difficult to break through as a professional, but if you do the right things, you have a fair chance of getting there. You can penetrate this clique without winning a Booker Prize, so don’t measure yourself by impossible standards like I did.

Along the way into that group, you will fail so many times, just as I did. One thing I know for sure is you can’t succeed as a writer without failing, but if you don’t know how you’re failing, it will never do you any good. We’re here to cast a light on all the ways we get it wrong, and that can be discouraging. Welcome to criticism week. Pull up a chair.