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Thoughts on the criticism of my writing
Preamble:
The first criticism of my writing, at least the criticism that I remember, was in 1950 when I was in grade one in the then small town of Burlington Ontario. Burlington was nestled at the heel of what was then and is still called southern Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. The town is and was jammed right at the left-hand end of Lake Ontario. I’m sure I received criticism of my scribblings in the three years before that in my early childhood from my family members and playmates, perhaps as early as 1947 when I was three or four years old and colouring or printing my first words on paper.
I have no memories of that incoming criticism, no memories until, as I say, 1950. That was more than 60 years ago: 1950 to 2011. I do have memories of criticism of my behaviour as early as the age of four in 1948 when my father applied a wooden hair-brush to my bare bottom as he was asked to do by my mother for some misdemeanour, a behavioural indiscretion the details of which are now long forgotten.
When one is a student, as I was from 1949 to 1970 in Canada, and in Australia from 1974 to 1988, receiving criticism of what one writes is part of the core of the educational process. Sometimes that criticism is fair and helpful; sometimes it is unkind and destructive. It is not my intention here to provide a detailed outline of those several decades of criticism of my writing. In general, though, the comments on my writing covered the complete range from the best of the best to the worst of the worst.
1.THE TRANSITION TO WRITING ON THE INTERNET
Early in this new, this third, millennium, in 2004 to be precise, I began to receive written criticism of my prose and poetry on the internet. I had received criticism, mostly verbal, of my published writing from 1974 to 2004 during which time I was able to publish some 150 essays in newspapers and magazines, newsletters and in-house publications where I worked in several towns and cities in Australia. Writing had become, by the 1970s, a more central focus to my life, much more central than it had ever been, although it had always been central in one way or another at least, as I say above, since 1950.
Being on the receiving end of criticism in cyberspace has been, in some ways, just a continuation of the first half-century, 1950-2000, of comments by teachers and students, by supervisors and the general public on what I had written. Some readers have been so impressed with my writing that they have asked for more, poured praise and expressed their enthusiasm.
2. INTERNET CRITICISM
2.1 The Bullies:
The internet, though, is full of lumpen bully-boys who prowl the blogosphere. Some of the bully-boys, and girls--for bullying is not confined to the male gender—do all their work at one site and they have literally thousands of posts at that site. If they see someone’s ego getting out of hand, or if they judge some new site participant as not fitting into the site conventions in some way or other, they make it their job to cut them down to size thus intimidating many a potential site writer and poster. So be warned, writers at internet sites need to be conscious of site conventions and, initially anyway, not post items that challenge what you might call the site’s orthodoxy.
Such internet bullies remind me of some of the teachers I have worked with in my 50 years in classrooms. Such teachers saw their role as pushing and pulling all their students into line by the exercise of their authority. On the site boards, as internet sites are often called, where site activists live and have their being, the authority of site administrators and moderators is exercised like a heavy club, an iron fist. They see their task as one of ensuring the maintenance of site rules and routines, conventions and styles. “Newbies,” as new members are often called, must fall in or ship out. This ‘site-orthodoxy’ which prevails is important for a new poster to become familiar with and become familiar fast if he does not want his emotions trashed, stepped on with little knowledge of what some call awareness of emotional intelligence and etiquette of expression.
2.1 The Fundamentalists:
There are a wide range of hysterical secularists, what I have come to call the secular fundamentalists, who proliferate among the immense commentariat that is the internet. They are not unlike many of the so-called Bible-bashers that fill out global society by the millions. There are also the dogmatic Islamists and Christian fundamentalists, among others who want to impose their absolutes on others. They try to inflict, or perhaps promote, their interpretation of the Quran or the Bible on the rest of the Muslim or Christian communities, respectively.
3. CRITICISM AND PRAISE: WHAT WRITERS NEED
My experience on the internet in the last decade, 2001 to 2011, is, just a continuation of those decades of criticism and, of course, praise that I had already received. “Writers,” as the famous American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said so succinctly over dinner in the film entitled Last Call, “must get used to criticism.” After decades of extensive writing in many places in the public domain, I must agree with this entre deux guerres[1] writer; criticism is part of the air that writers breath and, especially is this true on the internet for writers like myself who have lots of readers. I do not ask for criticism, except at a few writers’ and poets’ sites whose purposes, among others, is to provide constructive, useful, criticism. Nor do I ask for praise. There’s nothing wrong with praise itself and, when it comes, I feel encouraged. But lip-service and flattery are cheap substitutes for praise when no praise is deserved. People who are addicted to praise will take what they can get and lap it up with enthusiasm.
The want of praise can be an entirely different matter. If one falls into the trap of constantly seeking approval, validation, and recognition from other people as the primary way to determine one’s self-value, one loses the ability to generate one’s own self-value. After years of getting plenty of praise from my parents and teachers and then my students, friends and colleagues, I no longer continue to rely on other people to buoy my self-esteem. Since I also received my fair share of criticism in the first 50 years of my writing life, I am aware of my limitations as well as my talents and capacities. I am also aware that personal, sustained and intelligent effort is essential to back-up any already acquired or natural abilities, what one writer calls unmerited grace. The process of skill-acquisition, at least in the area of writing, and at least as I have experienced it in more than half a century, is gradual, a daily exercise, not a constant nor linear but exponential until a saturation point is reached. No one faculty produces results and knowledge, love and will are what you might call the three pre-requisites to produceresults.2
The reliance on external praise can grow to the point that whenever someone praises you, even in the smallest way, you feel a rush of elation, the feeling that “someone out there values my existence.” As the famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once said: “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”3 This applies, a fortiori, to writing. Some writers only want praise but, after living Downunder for more than 40 years, I have come to expect and even enjoy a little criticism. Criticism is part of the air one breaths here in Australia.
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Originally Posted by RonPrice
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