WHY CRITICISM OF YOUR WORK CAN BE THE BEST THING EVER.

It's been a while, hasn't it? Where the ruddy heck have I been? you are well entitled to ask.

Well, physically, nowhere. I'm still in the same draughty little Victorian terraced house with no internal doors on the bottom floor, in the same neck of the woods. But mentally and emotionally - well, stuff's happened. My son has had his last year of primary school before moving on up to secondary school, so it's been a year of eleven-plus-es, SATS exams and sorting out his new school. I've had to give up my allotment space, partly because it proved to be untameable (turns out there were good reasons why it had been left to go wild for two years before I claimed it, and its very untameable-ness was the main one.) But also because I decided to take on a volunteer job as a moderator on the Scribophile writing community site. It's a great gig, but not without its learning curve, and I've spent the last few months adapting to that curve (and frightening the pants off mental muscles I never knew I was supposed to have in the process.)

But through it all I have still been writing. Redemption has finally been exposed to some beta readers, and received a ton of useful feedback from those awesome beta readers. Yes, I now have detailed information about all the things that are wrong with the story and why I need to fix them.

'Oh no!' I hear you cry. 'After all that work, slogging away to make your story as good as it can be, now you're being told it's not working and you have to rewrite it all? How awful! You must be so disheartened!'

Actually... no. In fact, if anything, it's given me even more drive to work on it.

I'm not going to lie to you; there have been more than a few moments in the process where I've hung my head and thought "Holy cow, this thing is too flawed to ever be fixable. How could I have got it so wrong, whilst all the time believing I was getting it... well, at least a little bit right?"

See, that's the thing about criticism from living, breathing beta readers - the flaws they pick up on are rarely the ones you think they'll be. Oh sure, if you have an icky feeling that a certain plot point is a bit weak, or that this character's a bit flat and undeveloped, your beta readers are likely to notice it too. But sometimes they don't because their attention is drawn away by some other problem, that's way bigger and more noticeable - but something you thought was working just fine.

It's pure logic if you think about it; if you'd identified it as a problem you'd have fixed it already before giving it to beta readers, wouldn't you? But that doesn't make the unexpected criticisms any less of a curveball when they smack you in the guts. It makes you question your writing judgement momentarily - and sends your Inner Grinch into a happy-dance of smugness as he cackles "See? I told you you're not as good at this as you thought you were! Ha ha, those beta readers really took you down a peg or ten, didn't they? You and your high-falutin' ideas about being a 'proper writer!'"

(My Inner Grinch is a world-class git when he wants to be.)

It hurts, and he shouts so loud it's hard not to think that maybe he's right. But that's the time to take a deep breath and remember these important things:

- These flaws are not set in stone. They are fixable.
- Bad writing does not make you a bad writer. Even great writers do bad writing before shaping it into good (and then great) writing.
- If your beta readers have pointed out these flaws, they must trust you have the ability to fix it, otherwise they wouldn't bother giving you the feedback.

Then you can dive in and forage through what they've said - all the curveballs and nitpicks and unexpected misunderstandings - and take them apart.

Some of them will strike a chord with you straight away; the moment you read them you'll slap your forehead and say "Of course! How could I have missed that?" Those are the no-brainer, must-be-fixed notes.

Then there are the ones that make you think "Hmm... really? But that's how I intended you to interpret it - you don't like that? Oh... okay then..." Those are the ones where you can weigh up how strong the feeling is among your beta readers on this point (i.e. are they all saying it, or is it just one or two, with others saying the opposite?) against what your own vision for the story is and how true to that you want to remain.

And then there is a third category - and this is where a lot of the hidden gold is. You'll know when a piece of criticism falls into this category, because when you receive it you'll get an immediate urge to respond with sentences starting with "Yeah, but that's because..." or "No, actually, what's happening there is..."

Basically, it's anything you feel like the reader Just Isn't Getting or Doesn't Seem To Have Realised - and it's when, if you're smart, you bite back the urge to plotsplain and instead ask yourself "Why are they interpreting this thing this way?" Maybe you're not saying what you think you're saying, you haven't said enough, or you're saying too much. Whatever it is, readers are adding 2+3 when you want them to be adding 1+4.

Often it's because you know the backstory of both your world and the characters in it - what happened before this story started and how things got to be the way they are now - but, because you know your world so well, you're unable to see the way this alters the present-day world from 'the norm' the reader expects. An example: maybe in your sci-fi future-world they've been experimenting with genetically-modifying coffee beans for the last five years, trying to increase the yield. As an unexpected result of this experimental tomfoolery, coffee now produces the same effects as a Class-A drug.

You might take this information for granted and therefore not think it's necessary to include it, because you've been up to your eyeballs in your worldbuilding for months already. But your readers haven't, and without this key piece of backstory they're going to wonder why a) coffee seems to be the beverage of choice for addicts, and b) everyone behaves like lunatics every time they have a cup of joe. But they might not say it like that; they might instead say "these characters are a bit over-the-top in this scene," or "the hyped-up-on-endless-cups-of-coffee thing is a very tired cliche these days." So it's up to you to put the pieces together - and you can only do that by listening to feedback, rather than immediately going on the defensive.

Of course, this isn't to say that you must heed every single piece of advice and change your work accordingly. Sometimes a beta reader will not like something you've written because... they just don't like it. It's not their thing, or they wouldn't have done it that way themselves (this can often happen if they're writers too.) That's okay. All readers are different, which is a wonderful thing, or there would be far less variety across the genres and styles of books out there. Think of their comments as a barometer of the reading public in general, telling you which way your audience is likely to swing. So if your military sci-fi-loving beta reader is the one hating the romantic sub-plot in your epic fantasy, you can be reasonably reassured that you shouldn't ditch it based on just his say-so. In fact, his reasons for hating it might be exactly why fans of epic fantasy love it.

So don't fear criticism. It's there to make you a better writer, and it can help you to stretch yourself further than you ever thought you could reach. Good criticism points out the faults in the writing, not the writer, so feel free to ignore anything that attacks you personally. (But at the same time, resist the temptation to bite back. Swallow your pride, thank them for their time and move on. It might feel like they win, but honestly, mounting any kind of retaliation or even defence is a sure-fire way for you to really lose.)

Part of exposing your work (and by association, a teeny piece of your soul) to the world is getting a few scrapes and bruises to the ego. Critiques can sting a bit at first. But you toughen up a little bit more with each bump and knock, and eventually you'll come to see them for the character-building exercises they are. And you'll love them for it.