How I Learned to Love Criticism

And Stop Worrying so Much About What Others Think of my Work

I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have huge ambitions to become an author. In college, I was a double major in literature and communication and entertained ideas of being a journalist.

But as a literature major, I was required to take a creative writing class. I didn’t dread the class. In fact, I was looking forward to it. I liked writing stories in my spare time, but I wasn’t very confident in my abilities. I didn’t think I was good enough to call myself a true creative writer.

And yet, in that creative writing class, I was required to be a creative writer. Throughout the semester, we read some stories and poems, but mostly we wrote. Short stories, poems, essays, all of it. And the class culminated with a larger, finished piece of our choosing.

I decided to write a creative non-fiction piece about an experience from my childhood. I poured hours into that piece, writing and rewriting, crafting better sentences than I thought I was capable of. And in the end, I had a piece that I was truly proud of. That I thought was actually good.

But writing the piece wasn’t the end of the assignment. The second part required printing enough copies for the entire class to read, and then listening to the other students’…