The Tears, the Reviews and the Beta readers who make Authors cry

I was reading a rather amusing article about Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson’s turbulent friendship. Chiefly the very amusing image of Anderson lying in the dirt crying over a bad review he had gotten.

The friendship ended because of Anderson's weird behaviour.

But it got me thinking about thin skinned authors, and how readers' opinions on their beloved babies cause serious emotional damage if left unprepared.

As a relatively unknown author, I don’t get a lot of press, which includes the negative stuff. A blessing and a curse I suppose.

But when I do get negative feedback on say a beta reading excursion. I am not worried about the contents of it. What matters is how it’s expressed. I have rewritten whole stories if the feedback was overwhelmingly negative.

Such has been the case with Where Dreams Are Lost, The Pocked Forest and lately A Farewell to Humanity.

If I get popular, I will certainly have to deal with negative reviews and negative feedback. This is inevitable as not everyone is going to like your work, even more so when you are writing in a niche genre.

You cannot fight with reviewers; you cannot react on a public platform to those who don’t like your book. That hurts you, you can’t really recover from that because you become the author that lashes out at the reader.

You are unprofessional if you do.

And I get it; your lovely baby is perfect. You don’t want to hear mean things about it. But not everyone is going to love your perfect baby.

You need to separate the real critique from the bad. It’s what separates good advice that can improve your craft.

And what is complete nonsense.

The nonsense is a personal favourite of mine. Again, you shouldn’t interact with the nonsense spewers. They might not get your story or be confidently wrong in its history. But you cannot interact with them in a way that calls them out on their idiocy.

But you can make fun of them in private, within groups of friends or family. You can laugh at dumb stuff they say. My personal favourite was when someone tried to remove Big Ben from Black Masquerade, apparently unaware that Big Ben was fully operational in the 1920s.

The rare instance when I would say you should interact with the nonsense spewer is when they are a troll reader.

I am of the adage that you shouldn’t feed the trolls, which is good advice but limits interaction.

When it came to the rewrite of The Pocked Forest, I had someone who made completely useless comments designed to rile me up.

I would normally ignore this, as is often standard procedure. But at that moment, I had a lot of fun making fun of the troll. They never came back to me, they most likely never saw it. But it was fun all the same.

But the important thing is to parse the good from the bad, something that I am still struggling with homing in on. But I am learning, but I am pretty good at picking up what will work for the story I want to tell and what won’t.

I have and will remake stories that don’t work, or drop them if required. The hallmark of a mature writer is one who is able to kill darlings when required

But you mustn’t lash out, you mustn’t tell them what will be taken out and won’t be.

I made that mistake, completely unintentionally mind you. But it caused a very unhappy beta reader to declare my story unworkable.

That was for Black Masquerade, and people seemed to have enjoyed that one.

It’s important to note that for every negative opinion, there will be at least two positive opinions. At least if you didn’t completely screw up and aren’t completely untalented.

According to most people who have interacted with my fiction I am not those things.

I pray they aren’t lying.

But the important thing is to not upset people, every unhappy cooperator is a lost networker or friend or business partner. This business lives and dies on who you can connect with, what networking opportunities can be found.

You can make fun of the assholes, just not in front of them. Assholes and idiots don’t like being made fun of.

But when you are with friends and family, have a laugh, mock the asshole who couldn’t read long words but refused to learn about them. Enjoy their arrogance over a glass of wine while lying recumbent on a chaise longue.

Enjoy the glory of hubris and arrogance. Enjoy the condescension they dish out but can never take. We love to take pleasure in a person who believes themselves to be better than others.

But you should never directly tell them about their idiocy. Even if a reviewer says your story is the worst thing they have ever read. You cannot melt down, even if it hurts your feelings please don’t.

As a writer, hell as an artist, you are in the public eye, it is a front facing job and you cannot get a repetition of being a sore ass. Even if it is authentic, you need to create an authentic performance of yourself. One that is true but not unappetising. You don’t want to be seen as an immature child that cannot take critique, even if it is bad critique.

You need to have a thick skin, or even just the appearance of one, cry if you need to. But don’t do so in public, scream at the unfairness of the critique, but not at the people doing the critique.

You want to be an artist; you need to be comfortable being in the public eye. And you need to learn how to behave.

This is something Hans Christian Anderson never learnt, indeed what thousands of authors from the past to present, struggle to learn.

They take the rejection of their creative baby personally, even when it might be legitimate. Sometimes your beautiful baby is a misshapen hunchback that will be rejected by polite society.

And you must accept it; you must acknowledge your child’s flaws. And love it regardless. Or hate it. Not all children are equal in the eyes of the parents, regardless of what they would have you believe.

I think I want to finish this little piece with a short plea towards writers to be aware of yourselves. Just keep in mind that people are watching you when you log onto Twitter. You need to understand what people will think of you.

Anything you express, can and will be criticised. And you need to be comfortable with that.