Like so many writing-related things, I learned about handling criticism during my time in a college writing program. My very first college-level Creative Writing class introduced me to the concept of writing workshops, in which a student who has written a short piece submits it to the rest of the class. They read it and make notes on it, scribbling down thoughts between the lines and in the margins, underlining parts they particularly liked, offering corrections for mistakes, and finally writing up a paragraph or two to summarize their thoughts at the end. On the day that these critiques are due, the students all gather together as a class to have a conversation about what they've all read. They discuss the good parts, the parts that need improvement, and thoughts about the piece in general, all before handing the writer the critiques that they had written up.

I like to think that the workshop critiquing process is not unlike leaving inline comments on Wattpad and that the workshop discussion is not very unlike the reviews that we publish here in the GRA.

So far this process should seem fairly straight-forward, but there are some rules to the writing workshop that may surprise those who have never participated in one. The first surprising rule? The writer of the piece is not allowed to talk. It's not zir job to answer questions about the piece that was written. Zie is not permitted to make statements about what was truly intended. And it is especially forbidden for zir to argue with the students giving the critiques. The writer's job is to listen quietly and take notes until the end, when he or she is given the opportunity to ask a few questions about anything that wasn't quite clear or any aspect of the piece that hadn't been discussed as fully as desired.

Why isn't the writer allowed to talk during the workshop? Well, the first reason is that a piece of writing needs to be able to stand on its own. If you become a published author, ordinary people are going to walk into their favorite bookstore and come out with nothing but words on a page. Those ordinary people are not going to have you there to explain things to them. All they have is the book you wrote. If that book is not enough without you to back it up, then your writing has a problem.

Another reason is that getting into arguments with the students who are critiquing your work is actually very counter-productive. You may feel, as I often did, that you poured your heart and soul into your writing, that it is something very precious and so closely tied to yourself that any criticism of it stings as much as a criticism of you personally. Even so, you need to hear that criticism. You need to hear it and think about it carefully because that critic might have an important point. If you immediately reject that point just because it hurts so badly or just because you think that you automatically know better as the writer, you might be missing out on an opportunity to learn and grow in a very significant way. You are very probably stunting your own development as a writer.

Am I saying that the critic is always right? Absolutely not. Every critic has his or her own point of view, even experienced writing students and college professors. People have different tastes. They focus on different aspects of the work. Very often they disagree with each other, and they have these debates on the day of the workshop itself. If two people disagree, it should be obvious that they can't both be right.

Of course, that's exactly the problem with thinking that there is just one right answer, one proper way to write. Writers themselves have been disagreeing about the best way to write since the craft began. Critics have been at odds with each other for as long as there have been critiques.

The truth is that readers naturally have different tastes. You as a writer might argue that the best writing is the writing that pleases the greatest amount of people. If your biggest desire is to be popular, there is some sense in that. Other writers like myself, though, see writing as an art form. I'm not in it to appeal to the greatest number of people; I have a specific target audience with its own unique tastes that I want to specifically cater to. And if you write fanfiction, you have a built-in target audience as well.

Let's use the example of grocery store shelves. Pick your favorite manufactured food product. I'm going to go with frozen pizza for the purposes of this analogy. Now, assuming that you live in a capitalist country (like I do), you know that pizza is on the freezer shelf because the grocery store believes that it will earn a profit. The grocery store chooses to stock that pizza because they believe it is a good pizza, the kind that people would like. If that pizza didn't sell or if a different kind of pizza could sell better, the store would replace it with a superior pizza. Now, by these basic principles of capitalism, it stands to reason that grocery stores that have been selling pizzas for years would offer the very best pizza and that the companies that have been making pizzas for years would have the very best pizza recipes (otherwise they would go out of business).

Now, is there only one kind of pizza in your local freezer section? Certainly not in mine. There are thin crust pizzas and thick crust pizzas. There are meat-lovers pizzas and pizzas that are completely vegetarian. Some stores might stock pizzas that are gluten free, with crust made from unconventional ingredients.

All of these pizzas cater to a different type of person. Some people are vegetarian. Some people have a disease that makes them unable to eat gluten. Some people simply prefer thin crust over thick. And some people prefer the opposite.

There is not just one perfect pizza. There are some generally agreed-upon rules for what makes a pizza good or bad, but, at a certain level, it all becomes a matter of personal taste. The pepperoni pizza is probably going to be the most popular, but the vegetarians of the world would absolutely hate it if every pizza company only made pepperoni pizza. The makers of the gluten-free pizzas certainly aren't going to be the most popular, but they will be deeply loved by those who would not be able to eat pizza at all otherwise. Individual tastes matter.

When you are learning how to make a pizza, the person teaching you can easily tell you that, for example, you've made a mistake by under-cooking it. No one likes to have a pizza with soggy, uncooked dough at the center. But when it comes to deciding on what the toppings should be, the question of what's "best" becomes more difficult. There are certain combinations of toppings that just don't work, of course. I think that mixing the sweetness of pineapple with the spiciness of jalapeño peppers would be very off-putting indeed. There is a reason that pineapple is traditionally paired with ham. Undoubtedly, those flavors work together, but even such a winning combination will have its detractors (I happen to be one such person; I can't stand pineapple on my pizza no matter what it's paired with).

Now, let's think about your local bookstore. There are sections for all kinds of different categories of writing. There's a classics section for people like me who actually read Great Expectations and War and Peace for fun. There's a romance section that appeals to a group of people that definitely does not include myself. There's a fantasy section and a sci-fi section and a historical fiction section much more, each appealing to a different audience, and each section stocks a selection of books that might appeal more or less to different members of that audience.

There is no such thing as a perfect book. It is all a matter of taste.

So what are you getting when you receive a writing critique? You might be getting feedback equivalent to a cooking teacher telling you that your pizza is raw in the middle, that you have made an error that nearly every reader can agree on. On other points, you might be getting that critic's personal opinion, based upon his or her view of what makes writing good and how a book should be written to appeal to him or her and the audience that he or she is a part of. When you receive critiques from a group of readers like the GRA, you should understand them in this context as well. Part of the point is that each one of us comes at a fanfic from a different angle, each with our own personal tastes, opinions, ages, cultures, and levels of experience. We are meant to represent a sample of your potential audience.

It is not your place as a writer to argue and reject criticism without even thinking about it, but it absolutely is your place to carefully evaluate that criticism and decide for yourself how you would like to take it.

I once wrote a piece that I was considering reading in front of an audience as part of a special presentation put on by all the writing majors who were preparing to graduate. I was feeling nervous about it, so I shared it with a writing student friend, who marked it up with all his notes and then shared with me all the thoughts he'd had regarding it. This was a deeply personal piece, one where it especially hurt to hear any kind of criticism (and he did have some harsh criticism), but I listened to everything he had to say. I thought about it for a day or so afterwards, and then I made some changes. On the day of the reading, a few people in the audience gave me a standing ovation. A few days later, I got a message from the professor who managed the university's literary journal, telling me that a number of the journal's editors had been in the audience and had enjoyed my piece so much that they wanted to publish it. Now, it might interest you to know that my friend had approached me directly after the reading and remarked that I hadn't made all the changes that he had suggested. He had noticed some of them, but...

"I took them under advisement," I told him, and this was true. I didn't blindly follow every piece of advice that he had given me. Instead, I listened to what he was really saying, thought about how I wanted readers to respond to the piece, and made the changes that I determined to be necessary to achieve that outcome. That meant some of my friend's advice was ultimately disregarded, but it didn't mean that I hadn't thought about it and drawn conclusions about what it was truly telling me about my piece.

It takes some experience to be able to get to that level, but, trust me, once you're there, you can't imagine continuing to be a good writer without that ability to receive and evaluate criticism. You yourself might not be there yet. You might be receiving criticism of your writing for the first time ever and really struggling with it. Believe me, I know that it's tough, but I'm asking you to believe me when I say that it is worth it.

Is there any advice I can give you to make receiving criticism any easier? Well, I find that what works best for me is remembering that all of this is essential to reaching my goal. I need this particular critique to make this particular piece the very best that it can be. I need critiques in general to make myself into the best writer that I can be. I am willing to put in the work and undergo the difficulty because I want those things so badly.

It helps to remember that sometimes critics have their flaws as well. Depending upon their own level of experience, sometimes all that they can do is point out what doesn't seem right to them. Where a great critic can point out what's wrong and simultaneously offer the perfect solution, there are times when all of us can only guess at what would make the story better. If a critic does point out that there is something wrong, he or she is almost guaranteed to be correct in that there is some kind of problem for at least a certain type of person, but he or she might not have the experience or insight to be able to put a finger directly on the source of it. And sometimes, even when a critic does point out the proper source, he or she might not be equipped to offer the perfect solution.

You should always take critiques with a grain of salt. If a criticism just seems wrong to you, no matter how much time you spend thinking and reflecting on it, it is possible that it actually is. But, if so, there is probably either a fundamental difference of taste or something deeper at work in that area. You might be better served by pondering what the truth might be than by either pounding your head against the wall or rejecting it outright. This was exactly the case in the story that I told about my piece. I got some criticism from my friend that I knew to be purely a result of his personal experience and perspective. He told me what he thought was wrong, but I had to look deeper to find my answer. You should think about the criticism, but you don't have to take the judgment of the critic over your own. We critics always try our best, but we are only human, too.

When facing criticism, it also helps me to remind myself that I am not alone. Every writer has to deal with criticism. Even famous writers are sometimes torn apart in book reviews. Even famous writers had to face a steep uphill climb of criticisms and rejections before they published the very books that made them famous. J K Rowling's first Harry Potter book was sent to at least twelve different publishers before one of them finally accepted what would become one of the best selling books of all time. I challenge you right now to pick your favorite author and go out to search for how many rejection letters he or she received. I'm willing to bet that, if that author has spoken about it in interviews at all, you'll find that number is at least a few. My college writing professor encouraged us to go out and submit our first piece for publication for the specific purpose of getting our very first rejection letter to frame and put up on the wall. To those in the know, that rejection letter is a badge of pride. It shows that you took the risk—you put yourself out there, got knocked down, and picked yourself back up again. You got back on the horse. You kept trying until you got it right. You never gave up.

Sometimes those rejection letters tell you that you need to work on improving yourself as a writer. Sometimes they just tell you that your piece didn't fit the tastes of a particular publisher. Either way, it is so common to be rejected as a writer that it is just plain expected. If you want to be a writer, you need to expect rejections and criticisms just as much as you hope for praises. It's all part of the job description.

And that means that you shouldn't take it personally. Getting criticized doesn't mean that you're a bad writer; it means that you're a real writer. You should take the criticism as an opportunity to grow and learn. Or as an opportunity to learn who your audience is not. No one is trying to tell you that you are an awful writer. No one is trying to tell you that you should give up, delete your entire book, and never publish another word again. And if anybody is, you should call that person by zir rightful name: troll, not critic.

We at the GRA are trying to help you because we believe that you can do it. We want your book to be the best. If you choose us to review your book and the finished product has some criticisms, it's not because we're trying to hurt you. If we knock you down, we do so knowing that you can pick yourself back up. You are strong enough. You can improve. You continue the proud tradition of all the writers who came before you.

You're going to face more challenges than us along your journey. We simply hope that you will take criticism in stride and re-imagine a stumbling block as a stepping stone on your climb to greatness.