Defensive Line
Accepting Criticism and Responding With Grace
Defensiveness is a subject that is close to my heart because my chosen profession is reading people’s writing and then telling them where they should change it to make it better and you’re not going to believe this but people don’t really like that.
Anyway let’s talk about football because I understand there is important football this weekend. The oblong kind, not the round kind. A neat thing I recently learned about football is that you don’t have your offense and your defense on the field at the same time. The offense guys and the defense guys are different guys. That’s why there’s like a hundred guys on a football team. I think everybody else already knew this, but the only sport I understand is roller derby where you not only have your offensive and defensive players on the field at the same time but your offensive and defensive players are the same people because you only have ten people who are crazy enough to play that sport.
In football, these are different guys. When your team has the football, you put your offensive guys on the field. This is you, the writer. You are the football guys. You have the ball, which is your manuscript. You’re writing it. You’re trying to move it down the field to your goal, the end zone. The “The End” zone. We talked about this just the other day.
So once you get your touchdown and your field goal or whatever, your arbitrary number of football points, you have to kick the football to the other team’s offense so they can have a shot at getting the ball down the field toward their goal. The other team is your editor and their goal is making your manuscript as good as it can possibly be. As polished, as sophisticated, as clear and understandable as humanly possible.
So, naturally, you put your defense guys out there on the field to make sure that doesn’t happen. Right? That’s definitely in the interest of making the best book possible? You would not believe how many authors take editorial feedback exactly this way.
Criticism and attack don’t mean the same thing. They’re not synonyms. Criticism isn’t a type of attack. An attack is an aggressive action against someone or something. When you attack something or someone, you are trying to do harm to it or them, or you might be trying to defeat it or them so that you, yourself, can win. Criticism is an evaluation of someone’s or something’s faults or mistakes. Like an attack, criticism doesn’t feel great. Having your faults or mistakes—or your work’s faults or mistakes—pointed out to you is not enjoyable or fun and it feels like an attack. But it’s not an attack.
The purpose of criticism is to help whatever is being criticized to improve through the elimination of the weaknesses that are being pointed out. It’s not for the person doing the criticizing to feel good about themself or win something from the person they are criticizing. If you perceive criticism as an attempt to harm you rather than help you, then you’re going to respond to it like an attack. You’re going to want to defend yourself.
We’re getting close to the heart of the topic of defensiveness, now. To give you some background, I studied art for four years, and then I studied literature and writing for four years, and then I entered the workforce where I have had excellent supervisors and mentors for most of that time.
This means that I have received a lot of criticism in my life. I’ve submitted art to critique, writing to critique, I have turned in dozens of essays for grading and criticism, I have had my work performance critiqued several times per year for twenty years. I have also given a lot of criticism. I have critiqued the writing and art of others in formal and informal settings, and critiqued a lot of work performances during the fifteen years I’ve been supervising staff.
Over the years, I thought I learned that some people get defensive when criticized and some people don’t. Some people take criticism in stride—calm, cool, collected, appreciative of the time and effort you put in to help them improve. Other people just get defensive. They can’t help it, that’s just their reaction. They hear criticism and they take it personally and if they don’t take time to master that reaction before responding then they’ll be compelled to respond with an explanation about why the criticism is incorrect. “You didn’t understand what I was trying to do!”
This was me for a really long time. I learned early—as a teenager—that in the workplace you can’t respond to criticism with defensiveness because that reaction is unprofessional. I worked on recognizing situations in which I was likely to receive criticism, preparing for it, keeping my face as blank as possible, responding politely, and keeping my arguments to myself. But I accepted that I was just, at heart, a defensive person. That’s just the reaction that I’m always going to have when I get criticized. Not everyone experiences that reaction, but I do, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
After a lot of reflection, though, I have come to believe I was working from an incorrect premise. At some level, everybody experiences a defensive reaction to criticism. Nobody hears criticism of something they take pride in, or worked hard on—like their art or their writing or their work performance—and does not feel defensive. Some people just manage it better than others.
This is my first main point on defensiveness:
Defensiveness is a fairly universal reaction to receiving criticism but experiencing the feeling of defensiveness does not mean that you have to respond to your criticizer with defensive behavior.
I did not want to come off as a defensive, argumentative, unprofessional employee. I’m not stupid; that’s not a great way to advance your career. I imitated the behavior of the people I admired and became very graceful at accepting criticism when I received it. At least, I think I did. I receive a lot of criticism in front of my mirror, to be honest, but somehow I’m never watching myself to see how I react to myself when I’m criticizing myself. Anyway, even while I would go through the motions of accepting criticism graciously, my inner voice would still be saying things like, “Well, they just didn’t understand why I did it that way. I had a good reason, the way I did it was fine, I just have no avenue for making them see it my way.”
Over time, though, I came to realize why this was still a huge problem for me with writing and other life things generally.
If you give the outward appearance of taking criticism gracefully but you are still reacting defensively on the inside, you cannot benefit from the criticism.
If you’re going through the mental gymnastics of dismissing every piece of criticism as the person who criticized you not understanding your intentions, then you aren’t considering how you can incorporate their criticism to improve your work for next time. You will keep making the same mistakes. In a workplace situation you might tell yourself something like “Well, okay, Martin has a problem with X and so I won’t do X around Martin anymore” but you’re only adapting yourself to being around Martin. You’re not making a true positive change that you can carry forward.
With writing, this can manifest as “Well, Bronwyn didn’t understand my writing. I’m not going to show Bronwyn my writing anymore.” So you might smile and thank Bronwyn for taking the time to read your work and comment on it and then you get home and you put all of Bronwyn’s comments in the trash because you’ve told yourself that her commentary all came from a place of not understanding your writing or your authorial intent. Your writing doesn’t improve or grow. Plus, you wasted Bronwyn’s time.
If you’re going to write, and people are going to read what you write, then you’re going to receive criticism. That’s just going to happen. If you respond to criticism by reacting with a defensive response to your criticizers, you’re going to sink your writing career. If you respond to criticism with outward calm but inside you let your inner voice prattle on in a defensive way, you’re going to impair your writing career because you will not be able to use feedback and criticism to grow.
When you universally reject criticism—whether you do it out loud or you do it silently in your head—then you do not learn how to sort out which criticism to accept and which to overrule. If you can’t do that, you’re going to have a really hard time as a writer.
Before you can expect to get your book published traditionally, you’re going to get criticism from beta readers if you use them, from writing and critique groups if you participate, from the editors that you hire to help you get your manuscript submission-ready, and from agents. Expecting to send your manuscript to an agent and for that agent to respond and say “Yes! I want to represent this! Let’s sign the paperwork so I can begin submitting!” is completely unrealistic. Agents will ask you for major and minor changes to your manuscript to make it better and more salable—both before and after they agree to rep you. And then, once your agent is happy with your manuscript and submits it to an editor for consideration? Guess what. The editor is going to have feedback.
Publication isn’t the end of the criticism journey, by the way. It’s the barest beginning. If you want to do it, if you think publishing your writing is for you, then you have to master your defensive reaction to avoid alienating everyone you will have the pleasure of working with along the way and to grow and improve your work with their help.
First, you need to be able to distinguish criticism from attack. The distinguishing factor is not how the words in question make you feel, but the intent of the person delivering them: Are they trying to help you? Or harm you? It’s normal to feel embarrassed or hurt either way. If you put your best forward and someone responds by telling you that you could have done it better, it’s natural to feel hurt or embarrassed. That doesn’t mean that their intent was to harm you. If it feels like they misunderstood your writing because they weren’t considering your intent, that feels unfair—I mean, it is unfair—but it’s still excellent feedback to receive. Readers aren’t going to be thinking about your intent, at least probably not for the first hundred years or so.
Ask yourself honestly: Is this person attacking me or criticizing me? If it feels like an attack, ask yourself what they might be trying to gain. Are they just a cruel and uncaring person, who would say something harsh to make you feel bad? Are they someone who enjoys others’ pain? Note that not everyone is skilled at delivering feedback and criticism in a kind way. Someone who delivers their criticism with a lack of tact may come across like they are attacking you when they are actually trying to provide useful feedback. Conversely, someone who has a high level of social intelligence and tact can make an attack sound like criticism.
Once you have determined whether you are being attacked versus being criticized, you can decide whether to react defensively using these guidelines:
If you are being criticized, do not react defensively.
If you are being attacked, do not react defensively.
In fairness: If someone is physically attacking you, definitely defend yourself. If someone is trashing you professionally or publicly, definitely defend yourself. But if someone is telling you “your work is terrible and you should feel bad that you wrote something this awful”—while that is clearly an attack, there’s no point in getting defensive over it. If someone is trying to make you feel bad for their own twisted reasons, why give them what they want?
Look at it this way: If you publish, there are going to be people who don’t like your work and you will get Amazon reviews that say stuff like that and you will not have an opportunity to defend yourself or your work. If a critic hates your book and publishes an unpleasant review of it in the New York Times, you just have to live with that. Get practice letting attacks of your work roll off you. You don’t need to take them personally.
If someone is giving you criticism that is intended to help your work improve, take it in that spirit. Accepting their criticism, acknowledging it, and thanking them don’t cost you anything. If you respond defensively by telling them that they didn’t understand your work, or arguing about comments they’ve made, they’re not going to be inclined to do you this favor again. Maybe they know how to offer criticism in a tactful way or maybe they’re blunt and ham-fisted with their critique. The delivery is the least important factor in the equation.
If you need to have a defensive reaction to constructive criticism, have it on your own time. Give yourself some time to experience your natural defensive reaction, work out the arguments in your head, write your criticizer a letter or an email if that helps you organize your thoughts—and then don’t send it. Once you have some distance from the initial sting that caused you to feel defensive, you can get some work done.
Take a look at the criticism you’ve received and understand that you are not obligated to take it as gospel. There is a balance between discarding all of the criticism as useless because it made you angry, or hurt, or embarrassed, and taking all of it as a directive and incorporating every single change. Your work is your work and you have the final say in what changes you’re willing to make. But you won’t be able to evaluate your criticism effectively and determine what feedback you can reject and what will truly improve your work if you can’t detach your ego from the process.
In a game of football (or a match? A bout? I don’t know what a football throwdown is called), there are two teams working against each other for possession of the ball, to score points. They both want to win. You can view this as a metaphor for the struggle of an author and an editor, both trying to win by pushing forward their vision for a book. In reality, all the players on the field, from both teams, offense and defense, are working toward the same goal: To entertain the people who are watching them by giving them the best performance possible. They’re all playing the same game, probably because they love it and they’re good at it and also they get paid a large amount of money to do it.
You want what’s best for your manuscript, and so do the people you will encounter on your publishing journey—from your beta readers to your agent to your editors. You’ll progress from the people who care about you personally, to the people who believe in your work, to the people who will put their money and resources into your success. They’re all going to have criticism that will help you get to the next step. I encourage you to start training right now to accept it, respect it, and put it to work for you.
Enjoy your very special episode of football on Sunday, and I will be back on Tuesday with something I haven’t hit you with for a while—an article about one of my favorite tools of the trade. Have a wonderful weekend and stay warm!
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