Critics are useless

For just the same reason as the ‘faintest idea’ rule above. Just ignore them. Keep making work. Make it better.

Actually, let’s slice this particular onion a little bit finer. Critics come in three types:

  1. Professional critics. Largely academics or pundits. As written above, largely useless but can be harmful if you annoy one of them too much. Avoid.
  2. Audience critics. A reader criticising something they read, pulling it apart, finding what did and didn’t work for them. Awesome stuff. Totally irrelevant to you. When the work reaches that point, it’s their thing, not yours. Don’t mistake author-audience dialogue (which is that relationship you have with the community you are a part of) with intra-audience discussions. Telling the two apart is relatively easy. Don’t be an arse and pretend otherwise.
  3. Peer critics. Another practitioner picking apart how you did things and the effects you got. Useful, but both of you need to be in a space where you can give and take detailed advice. A lot of people don’t know how to give it. A lot of people don’t know how to take it.

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