by Christine Carron
Getting your work critiqued can be transformative. Most of us have probably experienced deep gratitude when a fellow writer shares an insight that allows us to see a weakness that we were too close to see on our own. Something that, once we act on it, transports our story to a whole new level of awesome.
Yet, even with the potential upside, many of us don’t like, and maybe even dread, getting our work critiqued. This inner resistance is so common that one university professor wrote, “Getting people to welcome feedback was the hardest thing I ever had to do as an educator.”[1]
The resistance to feedback makes sense to me. Why? Because along with transformative comments, we get ick comments. Comments that feel unfair, infuriating, or even flat-out knuckleheaded. Maybe even a comment so upsetting it makes us never want to open up to a critique ever, ever, ever again.
Unfortunately, that is called avoidance, and we have to manage that tendency because avoidance is not an effective coping strategy. It doesn’t benefit our psyches or our health,[2] and it certainly doesn’t help us grow as writers and storytellers.
So here we are: Receiving a critique has the potential to be transformative but is also super challenging. What are we to do?
Our Brains are Hardwired to Take it Personally
The most trotted out advice to writers is, “Don’t take it personally.” If that does it for you; if you’re clear and good to go regarding what that means and how to make it happen when you’re getting critiqued . . . awesome. My job is done.
If not, let’s get more specific on what it actually means to not take it personally, then we will have a better chance of sorting out what to do about it.
Let’s start with a formula: b + cf = T, where b = brain, cf = critical feedback, and T = THREAT! No matter how silly that sounds, research has shown that our brains respond to critical feedback as a threat,[3] which means receiving a critique is neither a passive act nor a biologically neutral one.
We are hardwired for survival. When under threat, our brains not only process information differently, but also adjust what information they are paying attention to. For example, when we are calm, relaxed, and feeling safe, our brains direct our middle ears to filter out unnecessary background noises and to tune-in to the normal pitch range of human voices. But when threat mode kicks in, our brains redirect our middle ears to focus on lower pitches, i.e., the tones of danger—think growls and howls—and filters out the pitch range of human voices.
Why We Feel Threatened by Critiques
This all means when we are under stress and experiencing the compulsion to fight, flee, or freeze, we can lose our ability to even hear the feedback people are giving us on our story. Slightly problematic for us getting good data out of a critique, right? Of course, threat mode also can mean sweaty palms and pits, racing hearts, and possibly even out-of-body experiences, otherwise known as disassociation. None of which are conducive to cool, collected processing of feedback.
Not exactly fun stuff, but at least we have a clearer understanding of what don’t take it personally means. When someone gives us that advice, what they are really saying, even if they don’t realize it, is to stay out of flight, fight, or freeze mode and stay in what’s called our Social Engagement Biology.[4] The state, let’s call it SEB, where we are calm, actively alert, and all our brain functioning is available.
Even just this deeper awareness of what is happening to you when you are triggered in a critique can be a huge help, especially if it is a more minor triggering. The thinking part of your brain may be able to pull you out of the stress spin just by noting, “Look at that, we’re dropping out of SEB. Deep-breath your way back to calm, my friend.”
If you want to expand your critique receiving prowess even further, here are a few more tips:
1) Treat Receiving Critiques as a Skill not an Experience
Instead of thinking of receiving a critique as something you experience, something that happens to you, think of it like any other important craft skill. Reframing it that way moves you out of passivity into action, into curiosity, and into learning.
The truth is that we can absolutely build our capacity to handle greater and greater levels of fear and stress while still maintaining a SEB state. If humans didn’t have that capacity, we wouldn’t have firefighters or any other professions where life-threatening situations are part of the job.
What would help you maintain a SEB state more often? Perhaps recommitting to a daily practice that calms you or learning a new one—practices such as mediation, yoga, or qigong. It could also be a subtraction, like limiting doom-scrolling time each day. Or something as simple as getting more sleep each night. Or all of the above. The possibilities are endless and can be completely customized to what resonates with you.
Just know that anytime you do anything that expands your equilibrium or resilience, you are adding more tools to your critique-receiving toolkit. Good on you.
2) Practice Stress Appreciation
I almost called this tip Love Up the Stress. Which perhaps would have been a little over the top. But perhaps not. Consider the data coming out of a study done with people undergoing stressful situations. Participants who believed that stress was harmful to them were more likely to die than folks who had the same stressors but who perceived stress to be useful, or just part of life, i.e., not actively harmful. Just the belief that stress was bad made the stress more deadly.[5] Yikes.
So, at the bare minimum, don’t stress about any stress responses that come up while receiving a critique. If you’re feeling bold, practice some stress appreciation. If you are feeling really wild, go right ahead and love up your brain and body’s stress responses. They are working to keep you steady and safe. That is pretty awesome.
3) Ditch Positive Thinking and Embrace Double-P Thinking
I run way upbeat, way optimistic. Seriously, I can balance out a whole stadium of pessimists. Well, okay, at least an auditorium of them. The reason I can do that is because I don’t do positive thinking. I do what I call Double P thinking: Possibility plus Preparation.
I perceive positive thinking as a little detached from reality. It’s not as if we can will things to work in our favor all the time. When I go into a critique, I’m totally open to the possibility that everyone in the room is going to be transported by my words and story. Unlikely, but still: Heck, yes! I also get that there’s the possibility that at least some of them will be, “Meh.” And, yes, there may even be a few who despise my story to the depths of their being.
And those are just the possibilities related to the critique givers’ emotional responses to the story. There are also ranges of possibilities for the actual comments they prepare (cursory to insightful) and for their delivery skills (kindly delivered to harshly delivered.) It might feel vulnerable to consider the less pleasant possibilities, but they may happen. Acting as if they won’t will not help you handle them if they do.
What does help is Preparation. By actively considering the possibilities, you mentally and emotionally prepare for them, training your brain to be strong, to be centered. That allows you to stay open and vulnerable to receiving what is coming in, because you have your vulnerability’s back. No matter what is said or how it is said, you are still the author of the story. You are the decider. You are the embodiment of power and vulnerability working together. And that’s the sweet spot for receiving a critique.
by Christine Carron December 13, 2020
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What about you, Scriveners? Have you ever been destabilized by a critique? Will this deeper understanding of what it means to take it personally help you keep your equilibrium more easily? What are ways that you already use to stay in SEB state?
Christine Carron
Process improvement maven Christine Carron (aka the Critique MD) has helped individuals and teams function more effectively for over twenty-five years. Described as The Wolf meets Mary Poppins by her clients, Christine blended her love of writing with her expertise in personal and interpersonal productivity to create Goodjelly [www.goodjelly.com], a blog all about acing the writing adventure. She is a children’s book writer and is represented by Ammi-Joan Paquette at the Erin Murphy Literary Agency.
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[1] Pausch, Randy. The Last Lecture. Hyperion, 2008. p. 113.
[2] Fernandez CA, Loucks EB, Arheart KL, Hickson DA, Kohn R, Buka SL, et al. Evaluating the Effects of Coping Style on Allostatic Load, by Sex: The Jackson Heart Study, 2000–2004. Prev Chronic Dis 2015;12:150166. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd12.150166
[3] Batista, Ed, Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful. Harvard Business Review, August 08, 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/08/make-getting-feedback-less-stressful
[4] To learn more about the social engagement system as well as our under-stress response systems, see Stephen W. Porges, PhD, The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine February 2009, 76 (4 suppl 2) S86-S90; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.17
[5] See Kelly McGonigal’s TED Talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend. https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en
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Featured Image: Otto Rethel The Schoolmaster
Informative piece, Christine. Very introspective and well written. I think the worst critique form is online reviews. Some are by friends and followers who write encouraging but not particularly helpful messages. Some are by trolls who… well, whatever.
I guess you have to assess where the critique is coming from. I have a friend who is as strong seller. She once told me not to read the reviews. I wonder what other writers think about that.
Thanks, Garry. Reviews are a special category of critiques, for sure. My sense it that the answer to the read/not read question depends on the writer’s mindset and goal for reading reviews.
Wahoo! Great to see Christine join the Anne & Ruth Team. I think a lot of writers “see” critiques much like suburban/urban dwellers “see” power lines. We don’t. Until they’re a problem (say the storm knocks over the power poles & the lines are sparking off the top of your car). This is great advice — plan for critiques. Get good at accepting them, processing them, and offering them to others. Brava!
It seems like the web at my first response, CS Perryess. 🙂 Thank for your comment. And, yes, I definitely have been knocked sideways by a critique or two, hence this plan. Critique skills prowess is definitely one of those unsung writerly skills.
Christine—Thank you for an excellent, well-researched post—and for your generous offer.
You’re welcome, Ruth. Thank you for having me.
I do the Double P thing! Now I have a name for it. As long as I have tried my best, that’s all I can do. I hate getting caught out by criticism when I could have avoided it (spelling! grammar!) but every criticism will help me improve one way or another by making me reflect. I definitely get that ‘ooof, that hurt,’ moment, I’m not a saint, generally because I wish I’d done it better first time. But then I loop back to ‘as long as I have tried my best …’
Awesome, Jackie. Glad you are already working the Double P magic. Yay! And, yes, those oof moments can sting, but it sounds like you have a healthy process of, “Feel and release.” That is another power move on the writing adventure.
Still thinking about this. I’m doing an MA in Creative Writing and my second piece of work is in the Workshop being peer assessed. It’s something I’m particularly pleased with, so all my fingers are crossed people like it (a lot!) but it’s better to know for sure. It will depend on their own writing how devastated I will be, I think.
I’ve also been reflecting that if I want an audience, which I do, then I am, to a greater or lesser extent, writing to please the reader, so I need to know what various readers might think and reflect on it. If they all come back with the same type of comments, it’s kinda arrogant of me to ignore it, even if it’s brutal.
I haven’t had any people deliberately being unhelpful, that would be a whole different thing. And then I agree with another reply that said to think about their own motivation for being so unpleasant.
Jackie, Love that you are still thinking about it. Handling critiques is a journey just like writing is. Yay to you staying present with this so as to find the strategies and tactics that keep you in equilibrium.
Thank you for this article, Christine. When receiving critiques I start by considering where the feedback is coming from–is the person attempting to help me improve my writing or do they want to inflate their own ego. If the person is truly attempting to help me even if the words are hard to hear I try to control my emotions and listen for the helpful words behind the rough ones. Learning how to receiving criticism is an important skill to develop.
You’re welcome, Leanne. I like your approach. And, you are absolutely right that critiques/the words can be rough—sometimes in content, sometimes in delivery.
For me, I take the position that every critique giver is doing the best they can to help me. Their best being shaped by their current skill level in writing and crafting feedback, as well as their general life experience/way of being. For some reason, that just helps me stay more detached. I then take what I can from the feedback and get on with writing.
I’m glad you have only had positive experiences when it comes to receiving feedback. Unfortunately, such hasn’t been the case for me. I have been in the very uncomfortable position in which the person who was “attempting to help me” was in fact only attempting to inflate their own ego. Thankfully that situation was been greatly outnumbered by the support I’ve received.
Oh my goodness, Leanne. I did not mean to imply that I have only had lovely critique experiences. Far from it. 🙂 But still, for me, if I take the position, no matter what, that the person is helping me to the best of their current ability, then that helps not get entangled energetically with the folks who may be trying to ego-trip me.
Most importantly, I am so glad that your positive critique experiences have outweighed the not-so-fun ones. That is always great to hear.
Fantastic tips, Christine. Superb explanation of why and how critiques affect us. Thank you!
Learning how to deal with a negative critique takes time and experience, IMHO. What I tell new writers is to read the critique, walk away, curse or cry (whatever you need to do to reach the acceptance stage), then come back with a clear head and get to work. 🙂
You’re welcome, Sue. 🙂 I 100% agree that this is a skill to build over time. And I love the advice you share with new writers. One of the most important parts of what you are saying is to feel the feelings, get present with them, don’t stuff them–let them rise and release. Then the clear head is so much easier to achieve. 🙂
Absolutely love this post. I’ve taken the slow, slow, very slow path from being so scared of critique that I never let anyone read my work to openly embracing critique as the number one thing that can make me a better writer. But, phew! It’s tough, sometimes. Love the “double P” approach; much more grounded that empty positive thinking.
Yay, Nicola! That is wonderful. And, totally yes on the “phew.” It is still tough sometimes. Which is my one of my key mantras in all things is: Progress not perfection. 🙂
I find I react differently if I trust the critiquer to be someone who wishes me well. If it’s a group situation, the group can foster that kind of tone. I should say I’ve had critiques of academic work that were far harsher than anything I’ve had on my fiction. I suspect the difference is that those academic crits were double blind. I didn’t know who wrote them and they didn’t know who was receiving them. At any rate, after a while, I did learn that my work was always better after a critique, and that helped me build a thick skin.
Great points in your comment, Dorothy. Trust absolutely helps us stay in our Social Engagement Biology. And you are one thousand and ten percent right 🙂 that the way a critique group engages (tones, process norms, etc.) can help build and maintain trust.
(I’ve heard from others, as well, that academic critiques can be pretty brutal. Good on you for finding your way through those.)
I love the idea of “double-p” thinking. I wish I had this post when I was in college, studying with a hyper critical, famous author/professor who had little praise for the MIT nerds in his class. It would have been helpful to have your wise perspective, Christine, at that impressionable age. The experience taught me the importance of finding what you love in someone’s writing and helping them build on that, not just focusing on what’s wrong. There is an art to critique.
Thanks, Lisa. I can only imagine how challenging that experience must have been with that professor but to come out of it with a visceral understanding of how important it is to find the good and communicating that to another writer? That is awesome.
Also, definitely agree that giving a critique is an art, and generosity plays a huge part of the art. Sounds like you have that covered as well. Yay!
Learning how to accept criticism is tough. Some years ago, long before I took up writing I was in a construction trade: floorcovering. One time I hired on with a large commercial company and was put in with a crew of eight, all of us accomplished carpet installers. Our crew chief was an arrogant fellow, acting as though he knew more than anyone. He was constantly on everyone’s case and our crew lost people right and left. Finally, after several months, I could stand no more and also quit. I hired on to another company and became chief of my own crew. I’d been there about a month when that critical chief from that other company showed up one day. I was tempted to treat him the way he had treated me but from the start he told the others that he knew me, knew how good I was and that everyone needed to listen to me. I asked him about this, why the change in attitude and he replied that he always knew I was better, that most others were better than him and he shouldn’t have been in that position. But he liked the pay and did the only thing he knew to do and became critical. So when he had a chance to correct his behavior by being subordinate to me, he did. I learned from him that criticism can come as much from the critic’s own problems as it can come from the problems with your work.
Thank you for sharing that, Neil. Though it was awful while you were in the thick of it, I’m not sure how life could have organized any more perfect of a situation for you to get the aha that you shared at the end, which I fully agree with. My favorite part of what happened is the choice you made about halfway through not to let his less-than-useful feedback behavior dictate your own. You kept in integrity with your way of treating folks AND remained in curiosity and kindness with him. Generosity, too. That is some cool self-mastery going on right there!
Very helpful, Christine. I don’t publicly critique writers and won’t post a negative review. Instead, I reach out to the author privately. A few years ago, I read a review that basically ripped the book apart. Because of what was said, I read the writer’s bio. It was his first book, he confessed to being hospitalized for depression, and mentioned that writing gave him a reason to live. Well, I bought his book, truly appreciated it, and wrote a counter review to the one posted. Ever since then, I write reviews that focus on the positive and encourage the writer.
Lovely, Gwen. Your comment is getting into the skill on the other side of critiquing — giving critiques. You are highlighting a very important factor: generous consideration of what is useful feedback for a writer at a certain point in time. Thank you for sharing here.
I take critique at face value. All critique is one person’s opinion, but many opinions are ill-informed, foolish, and just plain wrong. Others are based on a breadth of knowledge and experience.
A very grounded and practical approach, Kyle. What I like about it is that it keeps you centered on what you can know and manage; (1) what was actually said; (2) your assessment of the feedback’s validity and usefulness to you as the author of the work.