Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
- Christopher Hampton
It is a very strange thing to be a writer in the age of Google. The Internet remembers everything and, thus, certain wounds persist. Google used to keep me awake at night. The first time I actually Googled my name I almost puked. Apparently, my negative reviews as a playwright were getting far more traffic than the positive ones and--okay, this is honesty here and reveals my horrid, vain nature--I enlisted several friends to go daily to the positive ones, multiple times, so that they would appear first when someone Googled my name.
It worked, at least temporarily, but I can't tell you what comes up now. I have banned the Googling of my full name in this house. (I have a full name I use as a playwright that you may or may not be able to guess, but I'm not going to give it away. DON'T GOOGLE ME!! and now at least 75 separate tabs in Chrome or Firefox have opened and the Googling begins.)
I will tell you the worst one--with some minor verbiage altered because I don't want you to find this review and give it more hits LOL:
[My full playwright name] is so bad, she should be stripped of her wordprocessor before inflicting further ill will on American Theatre.
That same year I got other positive reviews where the words "witty" "sly" "clever" and even "brilliant" appeared. But which one do you think haunted me and kept me up at night?
There are two things I want to talk about here in terms of your 15 minutes: one is the way criticism wounds and two is the crisis in criticism itself.
A really bad review, or even just a harsh critique from a professor or colleague (I actually just got one that said I was "smarmy and maudlin" and prone to "platitudes") can inflict damage on you and can drain energy from your 15 minutes--and the less number of 15 minute increments you have available the less you can afford to let that be the case. I'm writing this here with this experience. Both writing that quote above and sharing with you the harsh critique I received from a pseudo-colleague, actually stopped me from writing as I dwelt in the memory of them and gave me a slightly loose bowel feeling. (Hey, honesty, transparency, right?) It is not usually something I'd care to admit, I'd like to tell you that I've grown strong and tough, that my writers chops are so well-formed that such wounding words have no power over me.
But they do.
And will continue to have power over me. I only dredge them up here and think about them in service to this entry--but this is the very reason Google and my name are not allowed to live together in this house. (Don't Google me! You just did, didn't you? Betrayal.)
So the secret is, unless there is a good reason, don't disinter past wounds and don't DWELL. It will take time from you.
The second point, for which I only have a minute left, is that criticism has taken a horrible turn away from development and appreciation toward snark. The minute artwork became another industrialized commodity is the minute the reviewer began to envision himself as a shark, using attack as a way of employing a sort of natural selection in the art market.
I don't imagine a false past in which critics were meant to aid writers and artists in their process and development and they taught people how to appreciate art with their writing. But at one time, that was at least an acknowledged ideal and goal. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the critic is supposed to do more than take apart and expose. She is supposed to cultivate, nurture, and teach--a good critic teaches her audience how to appreciate art better. Not how to out-snark the snarker.
But ech, you know, that's probably a whole other post. Times up. I've dwelt enough on critics. I hope it served you well--did it? Bury your worst reviews and critiques and don't you dare disinter them. I've got to go take a Zantac now.
Only one last thing--a good bad review or critique is one that after the initial sting subsides provides insight into where you could do better. You'll know which ones these are. The ones that take the breath out of the room where designed to do just that. To hurt. To wound. Stay away from those. Far, far away.
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