Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "fear-of-rejection"
So You Got a Bad Review
Here's an article I posted recently on LinkedIn.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
****
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
****
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
