There aren't a lot of people who having their work critiqued, but for an author it can be especially excruciating. Some of us have a tendency to blur the lines between our work and ourselves, so much so that we forget a critique of our words is not a statement about our worth.
Writing is an intensely personal endeavor. We spend hours casting individual threads until they weave together to form the stories of our characters and the worlds they inhabit. So, it's understandable that after all that hard work anything less than a glowing critique can be a bitter pill to swallow.
Understandable or not, the reality is critique and criticism are necessary parts of the writing process and learning how to give and give both are essential to the business of being an author. No matter how carefully you proofread or objective you try to be, you're never going to catch all of your mistakes or be able to step back far enough to take in every angle. Critique is critical to you success. No one is saying you have to like it, but you do need to learn how to accept it without losing your confidence, ending up on a "badly behaved blacklist", or ruining professional relationships. So here are a few tips I've learned about accepting criticism, correction, or critiques thus far:
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