I think we’ve all been on the end of advice which makes us feel uncertain about our work, and often ourselves. As writers, we invest a great deal of ourselves in what we write, and while most of us understand we’re not perfect, we’d rather not be berated or scoffed at in the guise of helpful advice.
I keep in mind the relative anonymity of the Internet, and the way it can bring out the baser sides of people who are otherwise probably quite decent. It’s astonishingly easy to level invective at someone you will never meet face to face, someone whose reality is still abstract at best. I reverse that for myself, and remind myself that this person doesn’t know me, or my life, and if they are projecting something from their own life onto me, it’s not something I need to own. I am responsible at the end of the day for the people around me, who I love, and who make my life worth living.
The words leveled at me or at my work across the ether of the electronic universe are only as valid as I allow them to be. If they contain sincere and constructive criticism, I’ll embrace them. I might not incorporate all of the critique, but I will welcome it in the spirit of wanting to grow as a writer. If they are mean-spirited, and designed to make me doubt myself, I’m sufficiently thick-skinned enough to let them slide past. That’s not always a helpful bit of advice, since words have a great deal of power to wound. We’re writers, after all, and we understand that. But words leveled at me which are designed to hurt my confidence rarely have that effect if they come from a relative stranger. I just write that person off as trivial, and move on.