Dear Maggie, my mom is a writer and lately her books have been getting bad reviews, mocking the stories or who she is as a person. She's obviously very upset. What do you do when you get bad reviews and know you can't say anything about it?

Dear steepingstars,

I feel for her; the internet has become a more gleefully nasty place in the years since I’ve first gotten published. Internet culture has decided that you can still be a heroic person as you mock or drag someone, so long as you have proven your victim to be a villain of some kind. I know very few villains, but I know a lot of people getting dragged. I won’t lie; it’s a hard place to be a writer in.

That said, I have three pieces of advice — and this isn’t just for your mother or for published authors, this is for any writer or creator. This is the world you’re birthing your stories into; you might as well get the nursery ready.

1) Think of your favorite novel. It has to be one that you’ve read lots of times. One that is basically a vacation home on your shelf. You’ve memorized lines. You know it so well you can open up to just a single chapter in the middle and reread it for the comfort of rereading it, and you don’t have to even read the rest because the story’s already hooked so securely to the coils of your brain. 

Now go to Goodreads and find the page for that book. Read its 1 star reviews. They will be terrible. They will be scathing. They will shred it. How do I know? Because every book has terrible 1 star reviews. As you sit there with your curled lip (WHO COULD HATE THIS PERFECT NOVEL), take note of the teachable moments within. Notice how the 1 and 5 stars reviews will sometimes disagree — “the character development is crap!” “the characters are amazingly like real people!” — but also notice how sometimes they will agree. “Chapter 14 was a leisurely dream; I loved it” or “Chapter 14 was pointlessly slow.” It’s important to remember that there is not a single story in the world that everyone will love. You don’t need everyone to love it. You have to write like you’re writing for readers who will love it. You have to write like you’re writing for the readers who want that story alone. 

2) If you throw out the extremes — the most searing one stars and the most dazzling five stars — you start to get into the reality. Despite what the reviews say, the odds are very unlikely that you are actually either the worst or best writer to have ever lived.

3) The personal attacks are a hard pill to swallow, particularly when someone shouts something you know isn’t true, but there’s no real point in defending yourself. Often readers come in assuming certain things about you, and it doesn’t really matter what you say or write, they’ll twist it round to make it further evidence of their predetermined thesis. I advise using list item #2 in this case as well. If you throw out the most glowing statements about your person and the most terrible snarled comments about your person, you start to get closer to the reality of who you are. Remember, though, the Internet is not your friend, even when they are friendly. They are also not your enemy, even when they’re terrible. They can’t be, because they don’t really know you. Only you and your inner circle have an inside line on the true colors of your heart. 

urs,

Stiefvater