On Criticism, Rejection, and the Stamina Required to become a writer
We regularly workshop student writing in my classes. In nearly 30 years of teaching writing, a lot has changed, but one thing remains the same: nothing matters more to people than their own writing, and nothing is more fascinating to the people in the room than the other people in the room. They’ll take a piece in progress over something already published, which they can’t change, any day.
Interesting, right?
Now, before I get into the lessons I have for you, let me go first. You know I have writerly ambitions, and I never want to teach from on high. Like a good politician, I always want to be in the mean writing streets, with my finger on the pulse of what it’s really like for you. I try to stay close to the hunger it takes to produce anything worth reading. As much as I can, I invest in writing coaches, conferences, and retreats, going as a student and approaching my work with a beginner’s mind.
Would you trust a therapist who’d never sat in the client’s chair?
Now, bear with me as I tell you this part of my story, in the hopes that I can balance whatever untruth you might be building about how you and I are different, or how criticism and rejection feel for you versus for me, blah, blah, blah, to all the separation.
We are one, my loves.
I also share myself so you can know me, which is another of the top five reasons I write.
Some of you already know that while I was going through my divorce, I shared with some good friends what my ex-husband had written in his court documentation. I told them I wanted to become a better person, be better in my next relationship, and needed them to tell me the truth. They told me they suspected I have ADHD. This, my friends, is a WHOLE story for another time. Suffice it to say, when I finally saw a specialist, and she confirmed what my closest friends already believed, my whole life made sense in a way it hadn’t before. As I read more about ADHD (particularly in women) and learned from the psychiatrist, in light of the new diagnosis, my successes and failures made sense.
For example, my ex would say, “You can read Dostoevsky in a weekend and write a brilliant treatise, and you can’t follow a simple set of instructions. I don’t get it.”
His disapproval would send me into a shame spiral. Now that I know better, I’d respond differently. I might even agree. For me, boring directions feel like pain, while anything that interests me makes me lock in, hyperfocus, and go all in. I’ve since learned that’s common with ADHD.
Like many people with ADHD, I also deal with what’s often called RSD, short for Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It explains why, back in the day and before I healed this with help from my friend Dan Cordle, a bad photograph could quickly send me into a tailspin replete with gremlins that sounded like: You don’t even know how to dress yourself, how can you possibly ________ (fill in the blank with anything from be a mother to write a book)?
My first writing coach’s feedback could paralyze me for days, weeks, even months. Before I learned to trust her 90% of the time, her comments would make me focus on her rather than on myself or the writing until my fight-or-flight calmed down: “She’s a bitch.” “She thinks she’s all that.” A few weeks later, I could look at the same piece, same comments, and think, She’s got a point. I wonder what’ll happen if I rewrite it like this…?
Did you know that in some professional writing workshops, the writer whose work is in the spotlight (that’s what my students and I have decided to call it) has to act like a fly on the wall and say nothing while everyone else talks about their work?
This is a gift! Listening like this is a rare chance to hear your work the way a reader will: without you standing next to it, explaining what you meant. Because that’s the deal, isn’t it? Once it’s out in the world, you can’t follow it around whispering, “What I was trying to say was…” The page has to do it. The fly-on-the-wall rule lets you find out whether it can, while you still have time to fix it.
It’s also, frankly, excruciating.
That said, the silence is temporary, and it isn’t surrender. When the talking stops, you’re still the boss. Every comment is an offer, not an order. You get to take what serves the piece, set aside what doesn’t, and sit with the stuff you’re not sure about until you make the best of it.
As Stephen M. R. Covey puts it in The Speed of Trust, “Feedback often tells you more about the person who is giving it than about you.” And as I always say, “The feedback doesn’t always know how to articulate itself.” And, if I’m patient and kind enough to myself, the spot in my work it points to almost always needs work.
And that’s a good thing.
The willingness to revise and try to make your writing better makes the excruciating part less painful. As the teacher, I can be the person the writer gets mad at, even if I say the writing is gorgeous, the kind of craft I’d happily teach from alongside a recommendation for change. If the writer isn’t ready to hear it, or doesn’t have the capacity at that moment, they may not be able to take the nudges that could make a strong piece even stronger, or run with them. They may even go away from me, giving me an opportunity to do a little more work with my RSD 😒😳😍
That said, I know that writer feeling from the inside. When fight-or-flight gets louder than anything offered for betterment, praise disappears, and suggestions can land like verdicts. That isn’t a failure of talent or character. It’s old hurt, reactivated. The worst part? We may not even know this is all part of the process.
So here’s what I want to say to anyone who’s ever asked for feedback and felt hurt by what they got: the first hearing doesn’t have to be the last word. But I do implore you to listen. Keep listening after that. Remember, Bitch? My first coach? Remember the same comment, a few weeks later: she’s got a point. A few weeks after that, she’s a genius! And when I finally nailed the scene…well, the pain was worth it.
The feedback didn’t change. I did. In between, I had to do the work. I had to remother the child in me who was often misunderstood, disbelieved, gaslit, objectified, and dismissed. I had to get comfortable with feeling misunderstood or unseen.
You can flinch, have owies, or recoil. And the only way you build stamina — and self-trust — is coming back to the page, and the group if there is one. Rejection can be intense; mine was (for many people with RSD, it can feel like physical pain, the way boredom can). I had to learn that feedback isn’t an assessment of my character, a prediction about my work’s worthiness, or a measure of my willingness to write.
What I want for you is enough stamina to take the sting while you stay with yourself and your writing; don’t run away.
Even the greats needed this lesson. In 1934, nine years after Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald finally published Tender Is the Night; he wasn’t in good shape. Ernest Hemingway, a sometimes brutal critic, wrote to him from Key West that May. He didn’t coddle him. He told him to write and stop worrying about what the boys would say.
Then he went first, the way I try to. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” he admitted. Hemingway. Ninety-one pages. If that doesn’t loosen the grip of perfectionism, I don’t know what will.
He didn’t pretend the hurt wasn’t real, either. He told Scott that writers have to hurt like hell before they can write seriously, and then he gave him the instruction I come back to again and again: “When you get the damned hurt use it — don’t cheat with it.” Use it. Don’t hide in it, don’t perform it, don’t build a whole identity around it. Be faithful to it, and make something.
And then, the line I’d tattoo on every writer’s wrist if I could: “good writers always come back. Always.”
That’s the stamina I mean. It’s not that you never flinch; it’s that you come back afterward: Bigger, bolder, stronger, more.
So here’s the most important line of inquiry I hope you’ll sit with as a writer: Can I trust myself enough to stand by my work, no matter what the critics say?
As always, I’m here for you. Reach out to me if you need me. And send me news of your world anyway.
Quotations from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1934, in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (Scribner, 1981).