Neil Gaiman once captured all you’ll ever need to know about criticism:
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
Thankfully, most negative commenters on our art self-identify by telling us not just why our work sucks and what we should have done instead, but also that, by the way, we’re an idiot for taking the path we have chosen. In theory, it should be easy to ignore them.
In practice, however, the amateur gives far too much weight to any kind of feedback, especially the negative, mostly because thank god, finally, there is something to give weight to at all. After months of laboring in the dark, finally, someone descended from their throne of busyness to comment on our work. It must have been important to them — but it’s definitely important to us. This is a mistake, because 99% of criticism isn’t helpful at all.
In my early days, I too made this mistake. Looking back, I can say the only truly helpful comments were those that encouraged me to continue on my journey. They came from people who were too nice to say what I wrote was crap, who didn’t know what I wrote was crap, or who knew but saw potential in a greenhorn yet to prove he was worth his salt. By and large, they were people whose advice I would have sought out one way or another, often in private, minus the public bar fight that is the internet comment section.
With respect to improving my writing, however, the only useful early commentary was my own. When I sat down with printed copies of my work to mark them, to bracket the unnecessary, and to swap bits around, eventually, structure appeared where once there was chaos. I didn’t need any “Good work!” “Time waster,” or other evaluative remarks to do it. I needed a pen, some good music, and focus. If you don’t edit your own writing, why should anyone else? It can’t be the end of it, but it’s a good place to start.
As my journey wore on and the comment section grew ever louder, I experienced what humans can only learn through habituation: I grew a thick skin. Only when you get too many comments to react to will you stop allowing them to push you up and down the emotional rollercoaster that keeps you from doing your work. The work is what matters, and I will not let other people’s reactions to my past self define what I must do today.
This wasn’t an easy lesson to learn, and it’s not a finished class by any means. I still take the occasional peek. I still fall through trap doors in my inbox. Every now and then, I live through Ted Mosby’s discovery of his Grade My Teacher page on How I Met Your Mother: After scrolling through 50 great reviews with a smug face, he finds the one that calls him boring and proceeds to fall apart at the seams.
I’m not as much of a drama queen as Ted, but I do find the scene’s principle to be true: Humans will react more severely to strong criticism than they will to even the highest of praise. Indeed, science confirms: It takes five positive comments for every negative one if a relationship between two people is supposed to stay stealthy. In the day-to-day of the arts, this may translate to digging for “your article is gold” comments in hopes of alleviating the pain of being compared to the plague.
Unfortunately, the plague always sticks, because it’s not just that our hearts are made of glass, it’s also that our brains are negativity-sniffing dogs. Negativity bias has multiple components: Bad events are more potent, take more vivid shape in our imagination, and stick around longer in our memory after they occur. The mind has evolved to identify and eliminate threats, not carelessly jump across flushing meadows.
In my quest to get off the Grade My Teacher merry-go-round, I — ironically — found three teachers, each with a different approach to handling the brain’s negativity magnet.
The first goes by the name of Tim Ferriss, and his idea was to go full Magneto — to turn the magnet on all the way, until you can extract the data point that fixes it, even if, per Neil Gaiman’s words, it takes a needle-in-the-haystack search to get there.
Ferriss bravely navigates the seas of negative feedback. He’s grateful for the people in his life who “cared enough to be a hard-ass,” he says. He dug through three-star reviews on Amazon to make The 4-Hour Workweek airtight. He treats every project like an experiment. “Data, data, data, I cannot make bricks without clay,” Sherlock Ferriss might say.
The second teacher has traveled around the sun twice as many times as I have. His name is Seth Godin and, looking back on those 60 years, he says: “I’ve never met an author who said, ‘I read all my one-star reviews, and now I’m a better writer.’ So I stopped reading my reviews. Five, one, all of them. I stopped reading four years ago. Nothing bad has happened to me.”
Seth Godin knows he can’t override six million years of human evolution — but he can turn off the comment section. Instead of issuing a blank check permission for everyone to throw tomatoes at him in public, Seth can choose who earned the right to say: “I think something is wrong here.” He need listen to only a trusted few, and if they voice concerns, he can set out to fix it — for that’s a puzzle only he alone can solve.
The third teacher only loosely resembles a monk on the outside, but I have no doubt he is enlightened. Derek Sivers once woke up to his own digital stoning for committing the cardinal sin among coders: He had switched languages and announced it in public. The lesson he learned was that “the public you is not you.” His online avatar was a cardboard cutout Derek, not the real one.
“Suddenly, it was like watching a little video game character get attacked,” he writes. “It was funny to watch, part of the game, and not personal at all.” Derek realized he could take neither offense nor praise personally, for those compliments and criticisms weren’t directed at him but merely a thing that he made.
Public comments are just feedback on something you made. They’re worth reading to see how this thing has been perceived. You can even take it as feedback on the public image you’ve created. All people know is what you’ve chosen to show them. So if your public persona is coming across wrong, try tweaking it.
There are three ways to handle the public’s response to your art. The first is to absorb every comment like a sponge, hoping it’ll provide the valuable extract that’ll push your next piece over the edge. The second is to do what we do best with advice of all kinds: Ignore it completely. The third is to analyze the sentiment at large without letting any individual comment get to you.
When I first looked at these role models’ examples, I thought I was standing at a crossroads: Absorb, ignore, observe — which path should I take? Yet, the more these and other teachers proved that each approach works, the more I wondered: What if these aren’t options but stages?
Many of us start out by caring too much, compensate by caring too little, and then end somewhere in the magic, golden middle. Many of us will pass many times through that cycle, and no one answer will last us forever.
There is, however, a common thread, and it leads right back to Gaiman’s garments: All of these criticism philosophies, whether through dismissal, disregard, or abstraction, mute the majority of people’s opinions.
It matters not which particular indicator you use to detect flaws in your work, nor where you turn to begin your quest towards fixing them. What matters is that the noise of the critics must not stop you from doing your work. One way or another, it is you who must detect, fix, create anew, and do it all over again.
Regardless of the form it takes, to the amateur, criticism is a welcome distraction. To the professional, it’s a necessary evil, and she’ll only open her door wide enough for it to reach in — until she can grab whatever treasure it carries right out of its hands and slam the door shut once more.
After all, it is not the critics for whom we toil away nor the audience, but a feeling which, of course, Neil Gaiman too captured in few words that somehow still leave no words left to say: “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”