Insecure Writers Support Group: Fear Holds Us Back

One of my greatest fears in putting my work "out there" was a fear of criticism. I told you last month about how I sat at my desk, finger hovering over the "submit" button, planning my exit strategy in advance.

I was afraid I'd be mocked. I was afraid I'd be told I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag, and I should be ashamed for besmirching the internet with my feeble efforts. I was afraid my story ideas were ridiculous.

I grappled with these thoughts for a while. That's what the exit strategy was about: I was planning to quietly delete the stories and disappear with no one the wiser if it was as bad as I feared it was.

I'd like to tell you those fears are baseless, but that wouldn't be honest. The simple fact is, there's never been a writer who hasn't faced harsh criticism. And with the internet making it easy for anyone who can type to post their opinions, you'll be exposed to it more than writers in the past, who might get a write-up in the paper if their book was successful enough to garner attention, or a forwarded letter from a reader.

Pick any author, even ones considered writers of great literary merit, and you'll find bad reviews of their work, sometimes phrased in very cruel terms. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said of Jane Austen: “Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow." Ouch!  Poor Emily Bronte must have winced when she read about her Wuthering Heights: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.” I recently read through Harry Potter's one star reviews on Amazon, and shook my head in amazement at the number of people who called Rowling's work dull, unimaginative, or said she was a terrible writer.

For me, what compounds this is a tendency to give more weight to the negative. The story I hesitated to post has over seven thousand positive reviews ... and five bad ones. Guess which ones I focused on? Deep down, I secretly fear they're right, and everyone else is just "being nice."

Criticism can be valuable. If it's constructive, you can use it to improve your writing. You learn by making mistakes, after all, and we often can't see them ourselves. That is the question you must ask when you're faced with criticism: Is there anything I can learn from this to be a better writer in the future? If there's nothing of value you can glean from it, then it is merely opinion. Everybody has one, none more valid than the next.

Yes, some people will be needlessly cruel. But here is the fundamental truth you must accept: Your critics only have the power that you grant them. There's an old Arabic saying, The dogs may bark, but the caravan passes on. Only you can decide if you're going to stop your caravan and take the barking to heart.

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You can see the other posts I've written for the Insecure Writer's Support group here. The main page for the group can be found here.