Writing.Com General Discussion

Hi and welcome to the site.

I guess that's a simple question without a simple answer.

As others have already pointed out, writers need to develop a thick skin. Honest feedback is going to hurt some times. I do find that it gets easier with time, though.

Another thing that might help accelerate this process is finding a writing group or regular critque partner. Having longstanding critique partners who you might interact with more regularly not only means that you will get to know their taste and skills and, thus, which comments of theirs are useful and which to ignore, but good relations often also results in the honest critique being easier to swallow.

I use the "WYRM"  group for this. It's for fantasy and science fiction writing, but there are similar groups on writing.com (WdC) for other genres and particular story types.

For you average random review on WdC, though, I don't think you'll have to worry too much about discouraging feedback. Most people tend to lean into the overly generous and/or bland review rather than risking hurting anyone's feelings.

As for getting practice, I've found it just as (if not more) beneficial to critique other people's writing as getting feedback on my own. I've learned a lot from seeing what other writers did well and thinking about how they pulled it off and from seeing what they didn't do well and realized I was making the same mistakes to some degree (which again made me think about how to correct those mistakes in my own writing).

Again, honest feedback will sometimes hurt, and you probably can't avoid stepping on someone's toes at least ones. Though, you can mitigate a lot by being polite. There's a big difference between "The protagonist was bland and annoying. I could not engange with the story at all." and "Maybe it's just me, but protagonist seemed to spend a lot of time complaining, which if of course understandable given their sistuation, but it made it difficult to really root for them." To me, the latter comes of as both more polite and precise (thus, being more useful to the reviewer and writer, both).