How To Handle Negative Feedback

How To Handle Negative Feedback

Creatives are a temperamental, sensitive bunch. They can be overwhelmingly overprotective of their work, too — like a fierce mother Orangutan to her offspring. I mean, it is natural to be protective of your art. After all, you can say you gave birth to it. However, you can’t stop people from taking a shit on it.

What can I say — that’s life.

But before you backhand the offending party, try to hear me out — someone whose work had taken a beating by friends, professors, and colleagues. I know it hurts, but it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Let me tell you the story about how I won the first prize for my college baby One-Act Play. This is me bragging, too, so maybe try reading on — you brag about your stuff, too.

It was a university-wide competition, participated by more than ten college faculties, including Law School (yikes). I wanted to create something different, and so I wrote a 3-page silent theater script with a flimsy plot about a dead kid and his mom (yikes 2.0).

I was pretty damn proud of it — until I showed it to my award-winning theater scriptwriter professor.

In my memory, I remember her being polite as she pointed out a few things I could improve on my script, but I’m willing to bet that was just my brain handling trauma and that it was a brutal criticism because, after our very brief talk, I went home, trashed my whole script, and started a new one two days before the deadline (mind you, I was a senior college student and on the verge of popping a major vein in my head due to deadlines).

This script bloomed into a 30-page story about all the women in my life. I was unsure about it, but the muses smiled at me.

I’m sure you’ve received your fair amount of criticism, and you’ve handled them the only way you know, depending on how you are built as a person. There are plenty articles detailing on how to deal with this. You can google “how to handle negative feedback” and you’ll be presented with hundreds of similar articles. They all tell the same thing: to breathe, to respond politely, and to learn.

But since you’re here, let’s put it in the simplest way possible:

If you know that the person criticizing your work knows what they are talking about, listen. If they don’t, then choose to ignore. But either way, be polite and say thank you, considering that rudeness can destroy your business.

Unless you are really keen in following what your audience wants (after all, webcomics is a business), you may want to sift the feedback not by dividing it between the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feedback but by dividing it between ‘credible’ and ‘not-so-credible’ sources. Then — this is the important part — you adjust accordingly.

That is how you handle negative feedback: with grace and acceptance. Our goal here is constant improvement, and to achieve that we ought to look into the nitty-gritty which we hate to do. Luckily, we have the critics to do that for us. The more challenging part is humbling yourself and finding the impetus to rework when your ego has just been crushed.