Write On, Sisters! by Brooke Warner

Author:Brooke Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Outer Critics

We cannot minimize the power of outer critics’ messages when we’re talking about inner critics, in part because a lot of us still have in our lives the very people (e.g., parents, family members, teachers, coaches) who lodged these original kernels of self-doubt and self-limiting beliefs in the first place. Also, because humans are complicated creatures, many of us find partners who reinforce negative messages. In addition to the people we grow up with, members of writing groups, peers, fellow students, and even our own children will sometimes make us feel as if we’re crazy or wrong or obsessed. Actual people in our life will state out loud the very things our inner critic tells us, creating a cycle wherein we will absolutely start to see our inner critic as rational and right and sane.

Be careful! Protect yourself from your outer critics where you can. If you know you have unsupportive people in your life, don’t tell them about your writing. You can say that you write or that you’re working on a project, but tell them you don’t want to share the details or that you’ll let them know when you’re finished. If you have one of these critics living under your own roof, consider writing off-site. Go to a coffee shop or a library.

Not only do outer critics reinforce the inner critic, but if you’re already feeling insecure or unsure, people in your life telling you that your story is full of problems, lies, or misremembrances can cause you to come to a full stop. Worse than this is the threat that someone will sue you or disown you. I have worked with authors (all memoirists) whose parents or siblings have threatened to sue them, whose children have threatened to disown them (and in a few cases actually have), and whose family members have insisted things didn’t happen the way the author remembers them, who’ve denied their truths. These situations can bring a writer to her knees, and in many cases these kinds of outer critics do succeed in turning a writer off of her project, when she decides it’s not worth what she stands to lose.

Novelists are protected by the veil of fiction, but that doesn’t stop the critics. Some of the most intense criticism that my clients have shared over the years has come from friends and colleagues in writing programs or writing groups. For whatever reason, fiction can be more competitive than other genres, and writing programs that cultivate elitism can breed the worst kind of writer—those who do not support and champion fellow writers. Whether these writers are jealous or operating from a place of scarcity, they become outer critics, lashing out and judging, offering poisonous critiques. I’ve known writers who’ve experienced this kind of crippling feedback from so-called friends and ended up taking breaks—sometimes for years—from their writing as a result.

Where self-help or prescriptive writers are concerned, outer critics can come in the form of people who don’t believe in you. I’ve

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