5 Ways You Can Deal With Your Work Being Criticized as a Writer

  Not everyone will like your writing. Heck, there are times you hate it yourself. As a writer, when you start putting yourself out there by showing your work, you are bound to find a stranger, fellow writer, or friend tell you that they don’t like your work. Criticism, whether from self or from others is hard to deal when it comes to writing yet sometimes, criticism that is done in a positive light can make you a better writer. How then do you deal with criticism when it comes in a way that will not deter you from writing but instead propel you to want to write better? Here are five steps to dealing with criticism.   1. Know that any review of your work is just a person’s opinion: Any review means, the good and the bad reviews that people do on your work after they have read it. Unless you have the whole writers’ community come together to rain criticism upon your work which does not usually happen unless you are someone like Chimananda Adichie or Chinua Achebe, any criticism you get to your work will be a few people’s opinion to your work. If you aim at being a world class and world acknowledged writer, you will have to learn to take people’s opinion as it is. Take what you can learn from every criticism and move on to create great masterpieces. 2. People’s tastes are different: I had a male writer friend of mine who once asked me what the topic of my message would be when I decide to publish my book and I told him I would like to focus on women’s emancipation and empowerment in the books I will publish. He was a bit irritated by it and kept telling me that there was nothing to write about on the topic because issues regarding women are just overrated issues. I did not take offense to that at all. His opinion would not stop me from writing on these issues. I took it simply that his focus was different from mine and there was nothing wrong with us having our differences about what we believe should be written and published. 3. Take it as a credibility review: All creative work done hardly attains five stars every time. This is because they are creative works and it is quite hard to put a measure on works of creativity. Not allowing the pressure to always attain five stars for your work to overshadow enjoying the process of creating a work of art says much about the humanity of a writer. This is not to say that attention should not be given to doing great creative work but when you discover that one of your works fall short, take it as a credibility review – that you are human, a writer and that you will become better at what you do as you keep at it. 4. Take it as a feedback: It can also mean a reader read your work and saw something he/she thinks can be done in a better way, or an issue he/she believes can be addressed in a better manner. Take it for what it is – feedback on your work. Measure what has been said about what you have produced and be truthful to yourself. Use it to make that work or others you’ll be working on better. 5. Just ignore and move on: Some reviews are just bad because they do not address the true issues of the work they criticize. Sometimes they are reviews that are just negative and that you can take nothing beneficial from. When you receive such reviews, we advise that you ignore them like they never happened and you keep on doing what you do; writing!