On Giving Notes

thoughts about giving and taking criticism

I first taught a writing class in the Writers Voice program at the West Side Y. It was a community lost-cost program and I expected people who signed up would be the type who wanted to try writing, as differentiated from those determined to make a life of it. That was somewhat true, but there were also many people who’d been to MFA programs already. Person after person told me they’d been so traumatized by the heavy criticism and competition in their program that they hadn’t written for 3, 4, 5 years. They’d come back because they missed writing and wanted the structure of deadlines again, and they thought a class at the Y would be a kinder, gentler re-entry. I made sure they were right about that.

I, too, had been paralyzed by the harsh criticism of a teacher. When I was twenty-four I went to a writing program in England and wrote poetry under the tutelage of a man who looked the part of a poet of his era, complete with beard and bushy eyebrows. For the first year of the course I was his favorite, which he showed by praising my poems lavishly and making bold predictions about my future, and often asking my opinion as if I were a co-teacher rather than a student. It’s complicated to be in this position, which is why it should never happen. Teachers really should train themselves not to value one student above any other; they all need the same level of attention. I did think my poems had something, but I wanted to learn, not be praised. Yet his criticism of others bothered me, and I knew I wouldn’t like that either. There were many post-class consolations of those in the cohort who’d had it rough in class, yet none of us challenged the teacher’s methods. We didn’t have the wherewithal to suggest any other way.

In the second year of the course this teacher, all powerful in his small pond, turned on me. I don’t know exactly why. It could be because I got a boyfriend whose opinion I listened to as seriously as I listened to the teacher. It could be because one night at a party I squirmed away from him when he pressed me to a wall and squeezed my breast. I thought it was because I was no longer writing the kind of poems he most admired, poems in old forms that I was good at making fresh. I’d started writing in a new way, influenced by all the music I was out hearing every night in late ‘70s London. I cut myself free of forms and wrote more intuitively than ever, with results my fellow students liked but he hated. He discussed each new work in class in venomous tone peppered with ad hominem attacks on me, even on my clothes. (Punk influenced.) It completely shattered me and I gave up writing poetry, at least I gave up showing mine to other people for a long time, and never tried to publish it. I didn’t have any way to understand what was happening and no defense against it. It was horribly painful and took me years to get over.

I didn’t want to do that to any other writer. That was my starting point for critiquing, and it was a good start—first, do no harm—but it wasn't a method. As I prepare to return to teaching mode, I have been considering where I am with critiquing, and how best to help.

Many students tell me they want to know how to revise. For a long time I offered a systematic approach that separately considered the major elements of a work and addressed them one at a time. Sometimes I suggested rewriting from scratch after going through all those considerations. And so on. There are many books on this subject that are useful, and in the end, every writer has to figure out their own way. But that’s all on the page, and before we even get there, it’s worth spending some time thinking about criticism in general—how we respond to it, and what we tend to focus on in others. This is a life question as well as a writing question. Once again, the aphorism that your writing problems are your life problems is a worthy consideration.

Recently I thought about criticisms I received as a child that have stuck with me over the decades, the ones that really got under the skin and that still make me quaver when I bring them to mind. They fall into two general categories; one is the completely unjust—being accused of copying or cheating, for example. The other is harder to pin down, so I will express it as criticisms that I felt helpless to address—criticisms of who I was, what I was like and how I looked. Then I thought about connections I could find between criticisms of my writing and these old wounds. Had the professor brought up that pain? Yes. He was objecting to my growth as a writer and as a human, and I couldn’t change that—life doesn’t go backwards. A friend recently reminded me of a rough conversation I had with someone once about my writing. She tore a novel to shreds, but kept saying “I love your writing” throughout the hatchet session, and I finally yelped, “but that is my writing!”

There’s the crux. Our writing, our made thing, exists both separately from us as an object that can be experienced by a stranger who has no knowledge of who we are, and it is an avatar of our choices, preferences, tastes, abilities, sensibilities, defenses, beliefs, intelligence, and blind spots. Critiquing a piece by a student or friend goes best when this is understood and a balance between the two established. Over the years I’ve come to invite students to say what they want to hear about, if anything. If they only want their work to be witnessed, I may read it aloud so they can hear it in another voice. If they only want encouragement, I may ask the group to read lines they particularly liked and say why they appealed. That is not difficult. It is when students or friends say they want to hear everything, and ask for toughness, that the work can veer off piste. Unless people have become self-aware about the kind of criticism that goes beyond the page in question, that might hark back to early jabs, feelings can get hurt. Is there a problem with hurt feelings? Shouldn’t we be tougher than that? I don’t think so. Writing is about feelings. If anything, we should be striving to soften them, differentiate them, see happiness or sorrow in many different shades. We should be very careful with the trust of others at all times, and carry our sense of responsibility for other hearts and souls over into critiquing writing, understanding that it is possible to silence a voice, to shut someone down for years if not forever, to do real harm. If we do not fully understand our power to hurt in a situation, we should think about it until we get it.

The other night I was thinking about this in terms of how people now verbalize consent in sexual situations. May I tell you about your character? May I point to a spot where I got confused? Slowly going over the body of a story or a novel, allowing responses to arise and bringing them into the conversation. Listening and being heard through the medium of a composition. I think this could allow the writer to grow and to see their own way to improvement. It’s worth trying. I also think it’s worth suggesting to writing students to become well-acquainted with what stings, and to have a salve on hand so that the pain is only brief. Fledgling writing is a very tender thing and should be vigorously protected. All writing teachers know that you can’t predict at the outset which students will hang in there over time, but we teach them how to return and return and return to the page without fear, until they can manage on their own.

Here’s a link to a recent interview I did with Mitzi Rapkin for the wonderful writing podcast, First Draft.