Creativity and Criticism

A few years ago, I sent two manuscripts—a short story collection and a memoir-in-essays—to my editor. When she returned them, I read through her notes and started forming a timeline for revisions, cover design, the final layout and proofread. If I was efficient, I could have a new book out within eight months, a year at the latest.

But then I stopped.

I realized, even if my work was ready, I was not.

I was incredibly insecure—still reeling from a series of big, life-changing events—and relied on my writing to cope with my anxiety and depression. I counted on work for any semblance of self-worth. I knew that wasn’t the kind of solid foundation required to weather the ups-and-downs of launching a book into the world.

So I made a commitment to refocus my creative practice to build a stronger emotional infrastructure. What were the skills, habits, or qualities that made it possible to be resilient and vulnerable while making and selling art? I experimented with different strategies and shared many of my notes in the zine along the way: social media, boundaries, confidence, control, facing the unknown. I was also diagnosed with OCD and sought proper treatment, and started building a life that felt fulfilling and joyful regardless of what was going on with my writing life.

As I approach the end of The Myth of The West, the novel I’ve been serializing since 2021, I’ve been wondering am I ready to publish a new book? Have I learned better strategies to deal with the harder parts of publishing? How well will this newfound emotional infrastructure hold up? As part of these reflections, I’ve recently taken an appraisal on how I cope with criticism. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed:

Feedback vs. Criticism
As I delve into some approaches to deal with criticism, I wanted to share some thoughts on the distinction I make between criticism and feedback. When I was doing theatre, we’d provide notes throughout the creative process: during rehearsals, after each performance, and in a post-mortem meeting at the end of the production. We used daily feedback to make small improvements for each show—the intensity of a stage light, how much of a pause to hold after an emotional line to leave the most impact on the audience. I approached book publishing with the same perspective—and I was wrong.

Once a book is published, there are few, if no opportunities to re-release the work, and feedback stops being helpful—because there’s not much you can do about it once a book is in print. The most valuable feedback you receive isn’t once the book is out, after you’ve already invested time/money/resources into it, but high quality insight from readers or editors you trust prior to publication.

Criticism is one of the personal aspects of creativity where we all might have different definitions. I currently consider feedback information that can be used to improve a project, and criticism a comment that doesn’t provide value to the creative process. These are some of the strategies I’ve learned to cope with criticism—those passing comments that don’t offer usable guidance, perspective, or feedback—and how we relate to our work once it’s out of our hands.

The Purpose of Criticism
I think of art as a public utility, a space for us as individuals and a society to explore our emotions, relationships, values, existential questions—and reviews create a forum for discussion. This is valuable for communities and audiences, but there can be limits to how useful it is for the artist. There’s a Cheryl Strayed quote that I often think about but hadn’t written down, where she basically expresses, My job is to write the story, everything that happens after is out of my control.

I hold on to that advice as I write, remembering my responsibility is to produce my best possible work—and everything after that, whether it is well-liked or wins awards or is review bombed—is largely out of my hands. And while I have read reviews of my published work in the past, I’m not sure if it’s a habit I’ll continue with future books. If I do, I plan to approach it by focusing on aggregate trends instead of comments from individual readers.

“Yuck”
I was recently having dinner with a group of writers, and the subject of Goodreads reviews came up. We traded notes on how we coped—and remarked on how the internet can be unnecessarily cruel. One writer mentioned that her boyfriend, also a writer, received a review on his novel that just said, Yuck.

He spent the rest of the week using the one-word review to provide commentary on their life. Pouring cereal into a bowl—yuck. Looking out the window to check the weather—yuck. Reading the news—yuck.

We laughed around the dinner table as the writer recounted her boyfriend’s reaction, and agreed that humor felt like a healthy way to cope with some of the internet’s less kind commentary. One of the challenging parts of receiving criticism, particularly online, is it doesn’t help to reply, get defensive, or justify the creative choices in our work. So when we receive these negative comments, there’s no place for our feelings to go. It can help to find humor in the comments—and to have an understanding community who can laugh with you.

It’s Not About You
We put so much of ourselves into a piece of art—our emotions, talent, memories, craft, inspiration, education, hopes, vulnerability, love—but when we share it with an audience, it stops being something that belongs to us. Somewhere In Between taught me that a book becomes its own entity, existing separately from its author. It speaks for itself in bookstores. It lives in homes the author will never visit.

I’m always in awe when a reader approaches me to say how much something I write meant to them, and I’ve learned that part of my job as an artist is to facilitate the relationship the audience has with my art. It’s not about me—but the reader and their relationship to the work—and I have to respect their criticism as readily as their praise if I honor that relationship.  

It also helps to remember that, while our art holds a piece of our humanity—it’s simply an object. It becomes static, a time capsule from a moment in our lives or creative journey—while we get to evolve.

When It Is Personal
Sometimes our toughest critics aren’t strangers on the internet, but the people who are closest to us. I’m not sure if I find anyone’s comments as searing as my dad’s. This isn’t just because of his insight as a reader or experience as a businessman, although both of those things informed so much of the writer I am today—but how much I love my dad and want him to be proud of me. Something I’ve had to learn, and continue to practice, is he gets to be wrong, and I can tolerate the discomfort of being misunderstood by him. By learning these skills with the people closest to me, it becomes easier to deal with random critics.

There’s no simple or single solution to coping with criticism from family, but I want to mention that your feelings are valid. If they don’t understand your art or see its value, remember that I believe in you.