I’ve never dealt with criticism well. Maybe I’m no worse than average, but I do find it easy to leap to the defensive.

I don’t know how I would have felt if the initial feedback to my writing had been wholly negative – if my readers had told me that I was wasting my time, that my stories were boring, my characters wooden and my prose pedestrian. I don’t know whether I would have argued or refused to listen, but I suspect I would have been sad for a while and then stopped writing,

Luckily, the feedback I’ve received, from both amateurs and professionals, has been generally positive and encouraging, but …

Novels are complex, cumbersome beasts and take a huge amount of training and cajoling to get them to behave.

My readers may have given me positive feedback, but that hasn’t meant that they think that my first drafts are perfect – far from it. Positive feedback is nice, and occasionally instructive, but the really useful feedback is when you are told ‘this didn’t work for me‘ or ‘I don’t believe that character would do that‘ or ‘you can’t just jump from A to B in two sentences‘ or ‘too much exposition’ or ‘your dialogue isn’t realistic, people don’t speak like that.‘ or … The list goes on and on.

The biggest revelation for me is that I don’t mind. No, it is more than not minding. I am very grateful for each and every one of these critical comments and I would guess that 90-95% of the extensive feedback I’ve received has led to some sort of change in my books.

It might not be what the reader expects, and it will almost never be what they suggest, but I am writing for readers and, if a reader tells me that something isn’t right, it is my job to do something about it.