Monet’s Question Of The Day:
The capacity to handle criticism and grow from it is a very important aspect of becoming successful.
Criticism comes in two flavors: constructive and destructive. Both should be handled carefully, albeit in a different manner.
Most people attach a negative connotation to the word criticism because it brings to mind something destructive. We all remember being taunted or criticized as children for no apparent reason, and those memories often linger into adulthood.
Destructive criticism aims to hurt an individual’s self-esteem, by causing psychological damage to people and rendering them less effective in what they do and who they are, as a result
How have you used critism to help you? Do you get easily offended if you feel you’ve done a good job, but yet someone still criticizes you? How do you go about GIVING criticism if you can’t accept it?
On a personal level, I’ve used criticism as a tool for improving myself. I have, with experience and tears, learnt how to tell the difference between someone who is criticising to be mean, and those who are commenting in an effort to improve me. This has been a hard won lesson.
On a creative level, I value criticisms to my writing, especially the positive kind, because it helps me to shape and develop story ideas, flesh them out, plug the holes etc. As a writer, you need to have two or three honest readers to help you develop the work, otherwise all the people telling you it’s great, may not even have a full grasp on what it is you’re trying to communicate.
As an editor, someone responsible for publications and quality control in a given, and specific project, it’s one of the hardest things to edit the work of sensitive people. I find these people lack the kind of self-confidence require to really achieve excellence, because even though they’re producing shit, they’d rather just crank it out, than actually aspire to greatness.
It’s such a bloody nuisance to try to help a writer develop, especially the green ones, when they take your criticisms personally. I have already blogged about the drama that occurred with two such over sensitive writers earlier this year. One was green, and the other was lazy. Neither could really see what I was trying to say. This is one of my challenges as well, how to say what I want to say, and be clear. I speak the truth sometimes, and people have a hard time taking it. So I guess I have to learn how to say it so sweetly, they can’t help but take the truth and not let it effect them. It can be tiresome, I have to tell you, but I must point out, that those who can’t take criticism, tend to remain green like that their whole lives.
On the subject of criticism, I again invite my readers to download and offer me feedback on the work of erotic fiction I’ve produced. Feedback, positive and other, will go a long way in helping the story to continue to grow and develop. In the state it’s at now, has already passed through more than one round of criticisms, the most valuable at the Eros Workshop group led by Mary Ann Mohanraj, a well known writer of erotica and other fiction on non-fiction works, and hosted by Yahoo!.
Any new criticisms, since there has been a great deal of addition and modification of the story, are worthwhile to me in every sense. I am very curious to hear what our generally over sexed or under sexed JS-er’s have to say about it.
However, I digress. I can take criticism if I think it’s warranted or invited. Negative criticism is often motivated by someone else’s jealousy or fear, or in an effort to control someone. I am trying to exercise control and deal with the matter in a diplomatic fashion. I for one though, think diplomacy can get you only so far, before the sword has to come out.
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