Have you ever written something and sent it out into the world for others to read and, hopefully, enjoy, only for people to leave a review saying how much it sucked?
I have.
But then, every writer has. Just like every writer has a stack of rejection slips. It’s part of the business and we have to learn very quickly to not take it personally; some stories just don’t connect with some readers.
And some negative reviews can be a learning experience.
I met this writer once years ago, Jeff Something, I can’t remember his last name and he’s not around anymore, who my friend Dave and I got into a debate with him on his blog about learning from bad reviews. He insisted he NEVER reads his reviews, which I thought was just ridiculous because, as I told him, if every review comes back and says how the plot was good but the dialogue was terrible, that’s a good indicator that maybe you need to work on your dialogue.
Jeff said there’s nothing to learn from reviews, good or bad.
Like I said, Jeff’s not around anymore.
And I’m not saying EVERY negative review is a learning experience—one of the one-star reviews my novel THE THIRD FLOOR received had this to say: “This book was awful. Can’t figure out why or how I managed to finish it. It’s full of listening…I will not be reading ANYTHING else by this author….” Full of listening, you say? I have no idea what to do with that.
Another said: “You know what’s scary? Subtlety. This book is anything but subtle. From the first chapter the house wants you to know it’s haunted. It’s desperate to establish right from the beginning that scary things are going to happen, and that makes it even more unscary. I want to be intrigued enough to read on and wonder what’s going to happen next, but when you bash the reader over the head right from the beginning there’s really no reason to read to the end (which I did anyway and regretted it).”
Yes, I very purposely wrote a haunted house book from the first chapter. Hell, the manuscript had a ghost on page ONE, that was my intention, so unfortunately I couldn’t learn anything from this one-star review.
However, another had this to say: “With their poor decision making (like Liz heard voices and immediately called the police, but when her stepson and herself began violently throwing up blood and he started Ebola-like eye, nose and ear bleeding she easily wrote off the possibility of going to the hospital), it was hard to feel any sympathy for any of them. This also impacted the “fear factor” of the whole book, as without that sympathy, their plight never felt remotely scary.”
That is an excellent point, one I don’t remember if I addressed in the book. Because in a real world scenario, yes, it makes perfect sense that if your son’s nose if bleeding that heavily (in the book it was only the son, not both of them, and if I recall correctly, it was a nosebleed, not throwing up blood leading to “Ebola-like eye, nose and ear bleeding”, but then I wrote this book over 20 years ago, so I could be wrong) you take him to the hospital.
The reviewer then went on to say: “Some other details were downright confusing – there was scene with smoking inside the hospital! The Indoor Clean Air Act went up in the early 1990s, so it would have been nice to have other indicators if that was the year this story was set.” That was my mistake. Having a mother who spent my entire childhood from first grade all through high school working in hospitals, I should have known that.
I’m not saying you take EVERY negative review to heart. Some people just hate everything. But there are times when criticism is helpful. We all want to be the best writers we can, so we have to listen to criticism and judge for ourselves if there’s anything worth taking away from it. In most cases, it’s just people being shitty, but sometimes you find a lesson.
And like Dave and I tried to convey to Jeff Something those long years ago, if every review says your plot has holes or your characters don’t ring true, that’s a lesson you should definitely take and try to learn from.
We’re writers, we have no idea where our weaknesses lie. But if you listen to the reviews, both good and bad, and find the lessons buried there, that’s just as good an education as anything. In my own work, I learned to either do a lot more research, or write around the areas I don’t know about. And I never ever ever have a character smoking in a hospital anymore.
And, to be clear, THE THIRD FLOOR has 17 one-star reviews, but 203 five-star reviews.