How To Overcome Writing Criticism

Find­ing the dis­ci­plined and wise writer

A dis­ci­plined and wise writer always shines like a bea­con of light. They write their words with out wor­ry­ing about the crit­i­cism that will befall them. The sad­ness that will come after­ward and they let their words speak for who they are.

Words should not be a knife, but a soft blade that doesn’t attack the story. Each story gath­ers the honey of what we’ve learned from crit­i­cism, but as we gather the honey we should be cau­tious not to harm the flow­ers of the story.

But as the anthill of crit­i­cism comes down upon the writer, they must keep writ­ing.

Get­ting through the anthill

The crit­i­cism we take as writ­ers is some­thing that we must deal with, and it’s only in the crit­i­cism, no mat­ter how bit­ing or fierce, we must learn from those bit­ing words. Only within those words do we find the small pieces within the crit­i­cism that help us along our path.

With each crit­i­cism we learn more about the story, and how to con­struct it. It’s in this con­struc­tion we find the story we should be writ­ing, guided by the crit­i­cism we found so biting.

With the wealth of the crit­i­cism gained we’re able to stop the sad­ness that has befallen us as writ­ers and instead we learn to use that crit­i­cism to the ben­e­fit of the story and every story we write after.

The sad­ness that once landed in our laps in the form of crit­i­cism is no longer there, it’s changed into some­thing beau­ti­ful that we can use forever.

Learn­ing from it.

Each act of crit­i­cism we go through as writ­ers teaches us some­thing about our writ­ing, for good or ill.

It’s through these acts of crit­i­cism, put in the cor­rect frame of mind, we are truly free of the sad­ness that fell upon us in the first instance.

We’re no longer wor­ried about what crit­i­cism will come next, for we’ve learned the les­son from the first crit­i­cism and have gained the knowl­edge to move on with our story and con­struct a bet­ter story, with less sad­ness than we had before.

How are you over­com­ing writ­ing crit­i­cism? Answer in the comments.

The idea for this post came from the Digha Nikaya as described in The Teach­ings of the Bud­dha by Jack Kornfield.

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Fol­low @Brian_B_Baker