How to Take Criticism Without Falling Apart

An editor I worked with had a habit that looked cold and turned out to be kindness. On receiving a savage review of a book she had published, she would read it once, then divide it, line by line, into three columns: true, false, and true but not important. She did this before feeling anything, on the grounds that feeling first made the sorting impossible and the sorting was the only part that helped.

The reason criticism hurts out of proportion to its content is that we receive it as a single undifferentiated blob. A note that contains one accurate observation, two misunderstandings, and a bad mood lands as a verdict on the whole person. Sorted into columns, the same note is revealed for what it almost always is: a small amount of usable information wrapped in a large amount of noise, some of it about the critic's day.

The false pile deserves more respect than we give it. There is a species of advice that insists all criticism contains a grain of truth, and it is not true; some criticism is simply wrong, delivered by someone who did not read carefully, misunderstood the constraint, or wanted something else entirely. Being able to say this is not defensiveness. Defensiveness is refusing to sort. Judgement is sorting and then discarding.

The third pile — true but not important — is where most creative and professional lives are quietly ruined. Yes, the introduction is slower than it might be. Yes, you say sorry too often in meetings. Both true; neither is why the project succeeds or fails. People who take every accurate note equally seriously end up sanding the same edge for years and calling it improvement, and the work becomes smooth and characterless, which nobody criticised because nobody had to.

There is one more distinction worth borrowing, this time from teaching: separate the critic's diagnosis from their prescription. People are usually reliable about where they got lost and unreliable about how to fix it. If four readers stumble in the same paragraph, something is wrong with that paragraph, even if all four suggested different and terrible remedies. Take the location, ignore the cure.

The last part is timing, and it is the hardest. Almost nobody can sort at the moment of receipt; the nervous system is busy. So the rule is to read once, do nothing, and return in twenty-four hours with the three columns. What is astonishing is how different the same document looks the next morning — how much shorter, how much less about you, how obviously the work of another tired person trying to be useful before lunch.