by Peggy Bechko
Everybody and his or her brother can be a critic; is willing to criticize the writing of others…especially if they don’t write themselves, right?
And over time all that criticism from editors, producers, well-meaning friends, critical relatives who just know you’re wasting your time, a reader’s group who though well-meaning, don’t know what they’re talking about, whoever, builds up until it all super-charges the self-critic already camped in your brain. In fact, by now as a writer of scripts and/or books, you might not even be able to tell exactly who or what makes up that tyrant of a self-critic sitting in the bleachers in your brain.
It might do you some good to figure out what the composite actually is, but the main lesson to take away from this is, your writing absolutely must make your audience come back again and again. The audience must look for your name in the credits of a movie. The novel must hook the reader to return to continue reading that book and to look for more with your name on the cover of the next.