The Art of Handling a Critical Review
As a writer, I frequently observe fellow authors in online forums grappling with bad reviews, seeking advice on how to respond.
Take the high road, ignore it, and wear it like a badge of honor, because the sting of criticism is universal, yet how we handle it carries us on our journey.
You can’t please everyone; haters gonna hate, and it’s all metrics that ultimately benefit you. Reviews are what they are, but don’t define us. This truth became particularly clear when I shared this perspective with a disheartened writer, that I now share here with you, because someone needs to hear this today.
Whereas the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes understood this challenge well when he wryly observed, “Criticism is something you can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” A bad review makes staying silent challenging. However, responding to a bad review is a dark rabbit hole that can tarnish your reputation and open up cans of worms you never wanted opened — never wanted going fishing for — never enough to pursue, and reason enough to resist the urge to respond.
Yet there’s another side to criticism. When a review’s constructive, they allow us to course correct and improve what we do, say, and deliver.
While our magnum opus might not be everyone’s cup of tea, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, be it — it’s good, great, like it, love it, hate it, meh, no opinion, or its shyte (their spelling, not mine).
Sometimes, we get golden nuggets from reviews because the reviewer clearly articulated what they liked, loved, or hated and what they would’ve liked to have seen or what the author could have done with the content. Sometimes, golden nuggets that allow us to improve or strengthen our content are impossible to find, and a shift in perspective is a better approach and mindset.
Ask yourself – Who do you write for: That one lone outlier who hasn’t shared anything constructive in their opinion that allows you to improve your content, or the genuine fans who like and love what you’ve written and clamor for your content?
Neil Gaiman offers wisdom here: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
C.S. Lewis expressed a similar sentiment when he noted that “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.”
Rudyard Kipling wisely counseled in his poem “If”: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same…”
His words ring especially true because a lone, lousy review eventually disappears in the sea of positive reviews, cast adrift as a random outlier with nothing similar or same to support or keep it afloat.
Besides, rare one-star lone reviews eventually become itty-bitty-teeny-weeny forgotten reviews that drown in the sea of higher-level reviews that eventually sprinkle, stream, and flood in. Because when you see one “it’s a shite” review, and none of the other reviews show or support this, it’s not you or your material that stinks in the end, but that one outlier reviewer that had an agenda or something stuck up their backside that day they left that review.
Virginia Woolf, who faced her share of criticism, noted in her diary that “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Her observation reminds us that criticism has long been wielded as a tool to discourage voices – but those voices persist nonetheless.
The key isn’t avoiding bad reviews – it’s understanding their true weight in the greater journey of our creative endeavors. Because what we create, what we write, what we share with the world isn’t for everyone. But for our audience and readers, it’s the perfect kind of content they want, they need, they clamor for most.
Here’s to action and giving yourself permission to continue to create, write and share – regardless of any lone, outlier reviewer’s verdict.
(And if you need a laugh, there are companies that will print anything written on a roll of toilet paper. This way, every time you have to take care of business, you get to honor that reviewer and flush after.)
J.W. Zarek is a Wall Street Journal bestselling co-author of “Writer’s Success Secrets” and “The Happiness Code.” His latest works include the Golden Book Award Finalist “Bella Brown’s Messier Than Messy Room” and the 41-award winning novel “The Devil Pulls the Strings.”
