Nothing Gets Your Mind Right Like a Hard Punch in the Mouth

I recently spent some time in a Ken Elkes online writing retreat. It was money well spent, even though I didn't get to participate as much as I would have liked. About a week into the thing, I was asked to edit a Ph.D. dissertation, which required a lot of my time for some reason. Working on these two things simultaneously got me thinking about how we, as authors, take criticism.

Oh, and I’m going to mix this shit all up with a boxing analogy. So, buckle up.

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When I was a younger man, I worked as a trainer in a kickboxing gym. One of my responsibilities was getting new people ready for full-contact sparring. Of course, there were a lot of physical things for them to learn, but the biggest part of the preparation was mental. And what, you may ask, does this have to do with writing workshops or editing dissertations? If you stick with me for a bit, I’ll show you that these things have a lot in common.

It can be pretty jarring the first time you get hit full in the face by someone who intends to put you on your ass. Your eyes get all watery. Your nose hurts in a way that I can’t even begin to fuckin’ describe, and your head feels like you sucked down a 20-ounce slushy in less time than it takes a bull to rid itself of a rodeo cowboy. It's fucking God-awful. A lot like getting that first harsh critique on a piece of writing you poured your heart and soul into.

My job at the gym was to be gentle, let a new fighter get past my guard, and land a few punches. Most of all, though, I was supposed to hit them in the face. Lightly at first, but with gradually increasing power so that I could evaluate how they would react. You see, if you pop some people too hard the first time they lace up the gloves, you can cause them to go all flinchy. And flinchy is really hard to get rid of.

For the dissertation, I was working on a short schedule, so there was no time to be gentle with my edits. The funny thing is that the recipient didn’t seem to mind at all. He took my criticism without flinching in the least. He didn't get butt hurt when I told him that a paragraph needed to be cut, or if he reworded a sentence, his meaning would be more precise.

At one point, he even told me that I could make any changes I felt necessary to the language as long as I didn't alter the intent of the writing. This is because how the words were strung together wasn’t the focus of the whole damn thing.

I was a little shocked because this has not been my experience with creative writers. We, as a group, especially early on, are kind of like those new boxers. We tend to be all wrapped up in our pretty little words and go all flinchy when someone tells us there may be a better way to say something.

Those first brutal critiques of our writing can be difficult to stomach. And for those of us with a semblance of compassion, this feeling can cause us to be less harsh … truthful when we critique the work of others. But more than just teaching us something about our writing, an honest critique teaches us how to get our egos bruised and keep moving.

For me, providing a critique in a writing workshop is similar to training a new fighter and nothing like editing a dissertation. It takes some skill to provide the information needed to help an author improve their craft without hitting them too hard.

What I'm saying here is that the goal when giving feedback to people new to the process should be to help them to improve their writing but more importantly, it should help them learn how to take constructive criticism without getting all flinchy.

When training for boxing, constructive criticism comes in the form of a punch in the mouth. You make a mistake, your gloves aren’t high enough, or you move left when you should have slipped to the right, and you get a piece of rough leather slammed into your face. The thing is, it’s rarely personal.

We, as authors, should strive to view criticism of our work in this way. It's not personal, and it's definitely not that they don't understand us. Sometimes it hurts, but it’s always done to make us better.

And I think it's better to learn to keep your gloves up from people you know and respect than to find out that you’re bringing your jab back too low from some schmo in a ring who wants to hand you your ass. This certainly is true for writing as well.

And getting punched in the face never stops feeling God awful.