When you’re a creative person it’s easy to become embittered and combative towards critics, amateur and professional alike. While it’s never a good idea to confront people in public and demand satisfaction over a bad review, it’s also very difficult to not occasionally have the urge to do just that. You pour your heart and soul and skill into a story and then someone dismisses it with a one-star review that doesn’t even have any words, and you want to go burn down someone’s house. Preferably the critic’s, but any house, really, will do.
On the one hand, criticism is a necessity. And learning to deal with negative opinions and assessments of your work is a necessary skill for any writer. On the other hand, every writer should also be a critic, because that’s a big part of honing your skills.
Everything Sucks
Writers are always advised to read widely and deeply in order to become better writers. You can absorb a lot of techniques, ideas, and inspiration from reading other people’s books or watching TV shows, films, and plays. And a lot of that happens without any overt effort on your part—you read a great book, you walk away with a subconsciously stored set of new ideas.
Even better, though, is to understand why something worked in a story you didn’t write. Why can this writer get away with so many flashbacks? How come this movie’s use of a voice over worked so well? Why did this book start off so exciting and then get progressively more boring as you read? Why did that character’s dialog make you laugh even when it wasn’t supposed to?
Instead of walking away from other work with a vague sense of whether it was good or not, thinking about it consciously and trying to trace the why is where you’ll be able to fully control the techniques you acquire as you grow as a writer. That means becoming a critic, and thinking critically both while you’re reading/watching and after.
Whether you want to start writing up your critical assessments and making enemies is entirely up to you.