Most authors are sensitive to and swayed by the opinions of others.
Salinger stopped writing his extremely promising Glass Family series of novels after his former supporters attacked his experimental novelette, Seymour. Still today, I look at my bookshelf and imagine the novels that Salinger ought to have written.
Likewise, the great Henry Fielding, whose novels were admired throughout England, abruptly stopped writing after his novel Amelia was attacked.
By contrast, look at the example of Anthony Trollope.
Just look at Trollope’s face. Anyone who wilts under unjust attacks: save that jpeg. Put that picture on your computer screen. Let it stare at you. That’s the face of a man who doesn’t abide any nonsense.
Trollope read all the criticisms of his novels, but always with a careful, cool, and critical eye.
He ignored both plain praise and plain dispraise, training himself to have no emotional reaction to either. He looked only for the rare kernel of useful constructive criticism, and when he found these kernels, he gratefully applied them to his writing.
There’s a saying, “It goes with the territory.”
Anyone who wants to be an ice skater must inevitably endure sprained ankles, bruises from falls, and time in the cold.
Anyone who wants to be a writer must inevitably endure unjustified and nasty attacks, incomprehension, well-meaning but wrong criticism, and neglect.
These are unavoidable costs.
Alexander Pope thought these costs so high that he claimed that if he had known of them, he would have never set out to become a poet.
But many writers are outsiders who don’t care very much about what others think of them.
Borges, for example, said that he would write even if he were the last person alive on Earth. Jean Genet, who was an outsider even among the outsiders in prison, delighted in offending non-convicts. George Eliot was willing to cut her family out of her life, rather than end her adulterous relationship; thus, displaying her imperviousness to approbation.
Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available on Amazon for $4.91.