Your ego is your best friend and your worst enemy. It can help you deal with a major loss, give you confidence when you need it most, and more or less allow you to go about your day feeling like a worthwhile human being. Hell, 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 having an ego isn’t a totally bad thing, but as a writer, it can prevent us from improving as it often leads us to ignore good feedback. And if you ignore that, then you’ll never really grow.
In fact, I would argue that being unaware of your ego and how it can blind you from the truth is perhaps one of the biggest reasons why 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 they continue to fight against all the criticism and write the same mistakes endlessly while remaining comfortable in their own little reasons for why their critics are always wrong.
A writer pushes through all of that and actively listens to feedback. But it’s not always easy. Even genuine writers, successful or not, can fall victim to their egos because when it happens, we’re not even aware that it’s happening as our minds do a great job of rationalizing anything. And if we can’t see what our minds are doing, then it becomes much harder to understand the problems we need to fix in our stories. So how do we avoid falling victim to our egos when we receive that necessary feedback?
It’s actually quite simple. Develop an awareness and understanding of your own thought process. This is called metacognition and it has fundamentally helped me both as a person and a writer because now I’m able to better process and mentally handle feedback from others.
That’s extremely important for everyone in and outside of writing to learn how to do because feedback itself allows us to better reflect on the things around us in relation to ourselves within reality, whatever reality actually is. Since we cannot truly know anything beyond ourselves, understanding other people’s opinions about us and our work allow us to validate our own opinions and improve who we believe we are.
If we’re getting criticized, then we know we’re doing something wrong and we 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 who you are outside of your own head.
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 other’s opinions either, because hidden in the critiques are secrets about yourself, your skills, and your work that have yet to be revealed to you and arguably never will 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 into a state of 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 constructive criticism 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 just to avoid the pain.
But cognitive dissonance is what writers have to suffer through 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 actually 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 writing because, like many, I thought I was better than I actually 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.
It’s true that sometimes people give bad advice, especially non-writers so that isn’t to say you should take all the advice. 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 when it’s bad. Not everyone is able to understand how or why it’s good or bad. But they can absolutely 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, and 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 they’ll reject it and 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.
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Story Prism, LLC