Your ego is your best friend and your worst enemy. It can help you deal with a major loss, gain confidence when needed, and make it possible for you not to feel like a worthless human being all the time. If you didn’t have an ego, you’d probably never get out of bed because facing the cold hard truth without one would be too much to handle.
So, yeah, the ego isn’t all that bad. However, as a writer, it can prevent us from improving because it can also block us from receiving good feedback. And if you ignore criticism, then you’ll never really grow.
I would argue that being unaware of your ego and its power to blind you from the truth is one of the biggest reasons most writers fail. People don’t want to face rejection. So when an aspiring writer inevitably messes up their first script, most are very quick to either give up before they have a chance to develop their skills or continue to fight against all the criticism. This will lead them to make the same mistakes endlessly while remaining comfortable in their reasons for why their critics are always wrong.
A great writer considers feedback. But it’s not always easy, as most of us often fall victim to our egos. And when it happens, we don’t even realize it because our minds do a great job of rationalizing anything. This makes it very difficult to identify the problems in stories. So how do we avoid falling victim to our egos? How do we learn how to listen to others?
It’s quite simple. Develop an awareness and understanding of your thought process. It’s called metacognition. This has fundamentally helped me, both as a person and as a writer. now I can better process and mentally handle feedback from others.
Self-reflection on your thought process when receiving critiques is very important for everyone in and outside of writing because feedback allows us to better reflect on reality and how we relate to everything. Since we cannot truly know anything beyond how we see ourselves, understanding other people’s opinions about us and our work can help us validate our differing views of the World.
If we’re getting criticized, then we know we’re doing something wrong and need to change or, at least, evaluate whether or not we need to change. And if we’re getting praise, then we know we’re doing something right and we need to keep doing that. So feedback is a great way to give you a glimpse of what you fail to see.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you should never trust yourself and always define who you are by what others think. But you should also not be so quick to discount the opinions of others, either. Hidden in the critiques are secrets about yourself, your skills, and your work that have yet to be revealed to you and arguably will never be revealed if you succumb to the emotional pain that criticism carries.
But why is it so painful to deal with criticism, anyway? It’s because criticism forces us to rethink the way we see the World, which takes us out of a harmonious mental state and puts us in disarray. A more accurate term for this frustration is cognitive dissonance, which is the condition of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes.
Our brains hate this, which is why we’re so quick to discount opinions that conflict with our worldviews. And what opinion can be more conflicting to our worldviews than disagreements about our stories? After all, stories are in a literal sense, reflections of how we see the World. So criticizing that means criticizing what we believe to be true. No one wants to remain in a state of cognitive dissonance, so to avoid it we generally fight or flight to stave off the pain.
But writers must suffer from this every time they complete a script and share it with the world. It’s the name of the game. That’s one of the primary keys to success. So the way you handle criticism without succumbing to complete depression or denial is to understand that cognitive dissonance, though mentally painful, is a good thing to go through if you want to get at the heart of your flaws in the writing.
I had an extremely hard time taking advice from others when I first started because, like many, I thought I was better than I was. But once I understood the reason why it was so hard for me and the significance of powering through that pain to find the solutions, I started doing what I had never done before. I listened to the advice and when I couldn’t understand it, which was all the time, I asked questions so that I could make sense of where they were coming from.
I didn’t ignore it or come up with reasons why I shouldn’t listen to them. I fully accepted the fact that I wasn’t good, that I didn’t know everything, and that someone was trying to point something out about my story that I just wasn’t seeing.
Sometimes people give bad advice. That’s true, especially for non-writers, so that isn’t to say you should take all of the input. But you should recognize that even though the person isn’t giving you the solution you’re looking for, at the very least, they’re probably recognizing an issue with your story that you don’t see. After all, not everyone is a writer. But everyone is a viewer and a reader of content, and everyone can recognize when it’s good and bad. Not everyone can understand how or why it’s good or bad. But they can tell when it is or it isn’t.
If you want to become a better writer, embrace the criticism and the pain that comes with it. View it as an obstacle to understand and overcome instead of a bunch of idiots to ignore. And always, always, always assume your work is bad until you get that applause from a bunch of strangers because stories might come from the heart, but they belong to the World, and the World will either accept it or reject it. There’s nothing you can do about it except to try and do better next time.
But the only way you’ll fail forward is if you confront your problems head-on and reflect deeply on them so you can understand where and how things went awry. So next time someone tears your script apart and you start to argue with them, stop and remember that it’s just your ego trying to protect you from getting your feelings hurt. Those beliefs and rationalizations you’re making may not even be real. They may simply be illusionary barriers that are holding you back from the truth, which is ultimately where the solution lies.
Thanks for reading this, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!
Story Prism
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