Podcast: Writing Despite Fear of Criticism
With Sue Campbell & Rachelle Ramirez
In this episode , hosts Sue Campbell and Rochelle Ramirez explore the pervasive fear of criticism that many writers face, offering practical strategies to overcome it. They discuss how fear can paralyze writers, especially in memoir and fiction, and the impact of social media criticism.
The episode addresses the psychological aspect of fear, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between real threats and exaggerated fears. The hosts provide methods to fortify resilience, like shadow work and approaching writing with a playful mindset. They also suggest practical steps like writing under a pen name or practicing in low-stakes environments to build confidence. The discussion aims to empower writers to push through fears, allowing their stories to reach and impact others.
Want more help maintaining a creative practice despite life's obstacles? Subscribe to the Write Anyway newsletter from Pages & Platforms.
transcript
Sue Campbell Writing Despite Fear
Anne Hawley: Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway podcast from Pages & Platforms and the Happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode, our host, Sue Campbell and Rachelle Ramirez delve into the fear of criticism that often paralyzes writers learn practical strategies to overcome fears of negative feedback and build resilience.
This episode is packed with insights to help you push through the fear and share your story with the world with more confidence.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hey, I'm Rachelle Ramirez and I'm here with Sue Campbell. Sue, how you doing?
Sue Campbell: I'm doing great. How are you, Rachelle?
Rachelle Ramirez: All right, we, today we're gonna talk about writing despite the fear of criticism, which is a big deal. I know with a lot of the writers that we both work with you as marketing and mindset coach for books and, and me as a developmental editor.
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what are the general things that come up when writers are talking about, shutting down writing for fear of criticism or choosing not to write because of the fear of criticism.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, I see a lot of writers getting locked up. Especially when they're writing memoir or fiction that's sort of thinly disguised, right? Thinly disguised fiction that they, they know will be interpreted as memoir by people in their lives. So I see quite a bit of that, but I also see I also see writers getting worried about just the online environment, period.
So they're worried once they start putting themselves out on social media that they will get trolled or they'll get doxed or they will, you know, just have people being mean to them online. So that kind of criticism, I see people worried about negative reviews. On Good Reads or on Amazon. So, you know, there's a lot for your inner saboteur to work with around criticism.
There are a lot of potential pitfalls and I think it's really important to remember that we hear about the big egregious forms of criticism that happen. But that's because it's so unusual that we hear about it. It gets a lot of the noise. Not that that fear is not real and that that can't happen, but I think it's one step, you know, in getting to your bravery around doing it anyway, is to contextualize it and say most of the really terrible things that happen are actually incredibly rare.
Rachelle Ramirez: In memoir I work with a lot of memoir writers, and you mentioned this at the, at the top here, where an additional fear of for memoir writers might be also the fear of the criticism of say their parents or their ex-partner or their friends, or. Oh my gosh, my kids are gonna read this later. So it's the added level of not just criticism, but accusations, lost relationships and that sort of thing that come from the critique of that work.
What are some of the things that you've worked with writers with on overcoming that? Is it first defining that fear of criticism or recognizing that fear of criticism?
Sue Campbell: Yeah. So step one is usually people know, right? They're like, oh, I can tell I'm not writing this because I'm really afraid of what my mom's gonna think. Right? So they, they kind of know that that's where it's coming from. But the, the fear feels very real and unquestionable. It just feels like a fact, right?
Like, if I publish this for sure, all of my relationships are. Or my ex-husband's gonna sue me, right? All of those kinds of things. So our inner saboteurs tell the worst possible version, right? We're writers the most dramatic possible version of what's going to happen at what, what the fallout is going to be, right?
So it's really important to separate truth from the story that you're projecting and telling yourself about it. And that it doesn't, you don't know. Right. We can't pretend to actually know what's going to happen. We need to almost label, oh, this is the story that I'm telling myself about it. This is what my inner saboteur is telling me about it, because my inner saboteur wants to shut the project down.
Right? If anyone's read the War of Art, Stephen Crest Field refers to this as resistance with a capital R, right? This force within all of us that wants to shut down any growth. So when you have a fear, often it is resistance or your inner saboteur just trying to shut this project down. So it can be a self-protective mechanism or it can just be a, I don't wanna go and put myself on the line type of feeling.
And it's really important to recognize that it's not strictly true. And to label it as you know, a thought that we have the option to believe or not, and that we have a lot of room to decide how we wanna approach the possibilities of what could happen. Once the book is out, and I know Rachelle, you and I have both advised people of like, first, will you just please write the damn book the way that you wanna write it, right?
And like, you don't have to make any decisions about publishing or what ultimately ends up in the book at this point. Like, you need to write this book as a creative exercise, even as a healing exercise for yourself. First, let's just start there.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right. I always say, you know, you can change na, like if you're absolutely afraid of criticism and it is keeping you from writing. One of the things that I've suggested that has helped and been also a temporary solution is start to write it at under a pen name. Create a persona for yourself where you have a pen name and even gosh, make an author page for yourself if you want to, and pretend every time you sit down you are that.
Biographer, or you are that hired ghost writer for that particular story, and then later, once you get the full, you know, flower and flesh of the story on the page, you can decide, okay, based on the process that I've gone through in writing this book, do I want to use a pen name or do I want to use my my name? Sometimes that helps in the process. And sometimes I say, you know, somebody didn't want to. Wind up in your book as a, as an antagonist or a bad character, then they shouldn't have acted that way. You know, who care? It's, it's on them. If that's what they do and that you're writing, if you're, especially if you're writing memoir, you're writing your truth not theirs. And if they wanna write a book and if they think they can write a book better than you can, then they can go and write a book. Right. What one of the things I've heard you say that I love is, you know, what other people say about my book is none of my business. I've heard you say that before.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, that's, that's an important thing to remember too, is like your job as a writer is to write what's in your heart to write it. Write it the best that you can, be brave enough to put it out into the world. And then after that, you don't get to decide, right? You don't get to decide how it's received. And.
I think the thing that really trips people up, if we're getting down to the core of it, is not the fear of being criticized. It's the fear of how you're gonna treat yourself if criticism happens. Like that will prove what I already think about myself, or that like we don't trust ourselves to be strong enough to handle the criticism.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right?
Sue Campbell: So really at the core of being brave enough to do it anyway, is fostering a relationship with yourself where you have your own back and you feel strong enough and resilient enough to handle whatever might come up in the world.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah, that is a big challenge, especially for people who may have been, you know, in difficult situations in school where the first pieces that they were writing or the work that they were doing was criticized or they viewed it as criticism or say they have ADHD or autism or some
Sue Campbell: Yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: divergent situations where they were told over and over you are doing it wrong.
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Rachelle Ramirez: it's one of the things that. You've talked about too, is that that fear of punishment, not just that fear of, oh my gosh, how am I gonna handle that? But also the, you know, when I rise, I'm, I'm, I am pushed back down. Or, even the fear of self-criticism, criticism of others. And also the other side of it is fear of success, which we could talk about on a different day, but sometimes pulling those apart is a challenge too.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, and I mean a lot of those messages come from early messages that we got, right? Like we preemptively criticize ourselves in our own heads, or we imagine the criticism that we're gonna get based on feedback that we got when we were kids, or you know, harsh criticism that we got when we were kids. And yeah, it can be hard to decide like.
I'm gonna do it anyway because I trust myself and I'm gonna develop that relationship with myself to have my own back. But really, that's your only choice, right? If, if you wanna get that book out into the world and you know you're gonna get a certain amount of criticism, your point of power is in building the relationship with yourself where you are strong enough to handle it.
And we can see examples of people who put something out into the world and got criticized and they couldn't handle that. They imploded and they withdrew from the spotlight in order to do that. And it's a shame because we all miss out when things like that happen, right?
We miss out on whatever that person was gonna do in the future, but we're at a point where we really can't get society to play nice.
Right? So if we want to have an impact in the world and say whatever it is that needs saying, then the point of power that we have is to work on the strength and resilience to be able to handle whatever comes at us.
And I think that's actually doubly important for people who feel like they're, and a lot of writers feel this way for one reason or another, whether they're neuro divergent or they just feel like an outsider. Right. They don't necessarily feel like they can trust society to agree with them or to have their back, or to give them support.
It's like, well, okay, then what do we have? We have our relationship with ourselves, and then the relationships that we're able to create with the people who are closest to us. I actually do a lot of shadow work with writers for this very reason. Because any is issue of confidence, any issue of fear, it's because we're either worried if we fail, we're gonna beat ourselves up. Or that we won't be able to handle someone else coming up and beating up on us.
Rachelle Ramirez: Can you say a little bit what shadow work is?
Sue Campbell: Yeah. So shadow work started with Carl Young, who was a psychologist.
He talks about
When we're children, there are parts of us, parts of our personality that your family or your culture says are not acceptable, so a lot of women in particular are told, you're too much, you're too loud, right? So we will try to hide that part of ourselves, even from ourselves. We'll push it so far down so that we cannot be criticized for that anymore.
It's a self-protection mechanism, and then we end up hating that part of ourselves. Right. We don't want anyone to see it. We don't wanna look at it. We don't wanna touch it. The danger of that is that then it kind of like pops up to the surface anyway. Right? And we don't have any integration with it. We don't have any control over it, or we cannot become our full selves in the world because we're not being true to ourselves.
We've hidden a big part of who we are. Because we were told it was unacceptable. So shadow work is trying to find those pieces of yourself that are like the grossest right, or the most shameful or whatever they are, and you actually go looking for them and try to understand their perspective because they have literally been shit on by the world and by you for however long it's been since they were created.
And so you have to rebuild that relationship. Accept your shadow and therefore fully accept yourself. And when you have that relationship with yourself, then it becomes much harder for other people to tear you down because you're not doing it for them internally anymore.
Rachelle Ramirez: And is that something that you could do for yourself or do you need to do that guided with someone else?
Sue Campbell: You can absolutely do it for yourself. It, I think it helps to at least watch shadow work done. There's a great workshop done by Barry Michaels and Kristen Sergeant. I don't remember the titles off the top of my head, but there are really good books on shadow work and you can definitely work with a coach or even a therapist on shadow work as well.
Really, really worth doing. You can have some pretty mind blowing breakthroughs when you start building that relationship with the shadow instead of trying to force it down and hide it away.
Rachelle Ramirez: Can you talk a little bit about a conversation that you might have with a client who is you know, they're stuck and I don't want to write, you know, they say I'm stuck. I don't want to write. I'm afraid of that one star review. I'm afraid of what my parents are gonna say.
What are the kinds of things that you walk them through? How do you do that,
Sue Campbell: There's kind of three different levels which you can approach it at. One that I think a lot of people have heard of but can still be very useful is you say, okay, what's the worst that can happen? Let's go to the worst case scenario. Walk me through what that looks like. So I had someone who I coached about a year ago, and she was writing a memoir about an abortion that she had in the sixties.
This was like, I think it might've been, it must've been pre-Roe versus Wade. And she said, well, my worst case scenario is that I'll be at a reading and someone will stand up and call me a murderer. Right? I'm like, okay, if that happened, what, what would you do? And so she was able to say, well, you know, I might cry.
I might, you know, run out of the room. And we just walked through the worst case scenario of what could happen there. And what she would do as a result of that? What would her options be? Both the good and the bad. And I'm like, okay, are you willing to go through something like that in order for this book to find the one person in the world who needs to read it?
Right? Who needs to be able to absolve themselves of the shame of what happened to them and the choice that they made? And she was like, yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: Wow.
Sue Campbell: So you've gotta look at what's at stake, right? And you're a developmental editor. One of the most important things you can put in a book, the character, there has to be something that's at stake. So if you decide you're not gonna put something out into the world because you're too afraid of criticism, what's the trade off there?
What are you giving up? And often that is a much heavier price to pay.
Rachelle Ramirez: disagree
Sue Campbell: is about your personal growth and your creativity, and you are literally choosing to squash it or bury it because of a reaction that can happen out in the world, and that actually often has much bigger consequences in your life than a temporary disapproval from an outside source.
So that's one level. You just play the, what's the worst that could happen? Game. Another one. Sometimes if it's just like, I think we just need a small intervention to give them permission to do it now, right? Is just like, okay, step one, we're just going to write the book you way you wanna write it, right?
Raw dramatic, the most extra version of the story. You're not even going to think about publishing. You can put that decision off to a later date. Or you can even tell yourself, there's no way in hell I'm ever publishing this. That's fine. Let's just write the book. And then at that later time when there's a book to talk about, then you can look at, okay, well do I wanna put this into more often that changes things once we have the product and we've done all of the work to do it, it's like, yeah, I really want this book to have an impact. I want it to get out there. And then you can take the practical steps of saying, okay, if this is actually going out in the world, what do I wanna change? Or who do I wanna check with to make sure what, whose name do I need to change? I, there was someone who talked about, I can't remember who this was.
Someone in the audience will know. I'm sure that if you are writing about a man and you don't want him to recognize himself, give him a really small penis, right? So what changes do you need to make to conceal identities of certain people? Like you can look at those practical decisions once you've written it the way you need to write it, then you can decide what practical changes need to be made before you put it out into the world. But often that can just be like just put off any decision about publishing it, you know, you need to write it. Let's just do that first. And then the third way is that shadow work. So what do we need to do to strengthen your relationship with yourself so that you believe you are strong enough to handle it? And that was kind of the next step for that case I gave about the woman writing the memoir is you are in fact strong enough to handle that if it happens. You're not gonna die from it. It's not gonna crush you like you are strong enough to handle it. So you work on your resilience and your ability to weather whatever happens.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah. One of the things that, that I think helps some people is to say, okay, well, if you're still at the point where you think, I don't know that I'm strong enough to handle it, you can also put in place the people, the community, the support system that will be there specifically say assigned, asked to help you when those particular things come up.
So the, say the woman who was afraid of the backlash at her reading maybe asking a friend or a family member, somebody to be there with her, who's gonna have her back in the audience, should something happen, you know?
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Rachelle Ramirez: a lot of times, especially women, we are reluctant to ask people for help. We're so busy being supporters of others that we're reluctant to ask people to support us.
But putting those people in place and asking them ahead of time sometimes is a really good piece. I think you and I know people who have, have said, you know, I'm not gonna look at my reviews at all. I'm gonna have say a friend or a fellow writer, somebody else look at my reviews and filter them for me, and only tell me about the positive ones that, that I, you know, should hear, or, or something like that. And sometimes even just thinking you're gonna have that in place might help
Sue Campbell: Yeah, exactly. And working with a coach or being in a writing community where you're all, you know, dealing with the same types of issues can be super helpful. There are a number of practical things that you can do to help weather when that kind of thing happens too. But fundamentally, even if you don't feel you're at that level yet, I want you to think of this as an opportunity to demonstrate and build your own strength.
Anybody who's in the, the public sphere, whether you're, you know, a high school principal or a writer who's going out and doing readings, we all have to build our own resilience to be able to handle criticism because there are no guarantees that everybody's gonna like us. And that's especially hard for women 'cause we're told that's our job, right? It's your job to be the way where you'll appeal to the most people.
Rachelle Ramirez: Can. you think of before we go, a, a suggestion for how somebody might build that resilience?
Sue Campbell: Yeah, so practicing small steps, right? Doing the shadow work, getting some coaching, practicing in safe environments, right? So like when I have clients who need to go out and promote their book and they've never been on a podcast before, it's like, okay, buddy up with someone, get on Zoom and pretend you're on a podcast.
Sometimes it's just like, we need to get in the reps. So you do the reps when the stakes are low so that you know by the time Oprah calls. Get our feet wet and get in the ring, so to speak. I hate sports analogies, but to start to feel your way through it and calm your nervous system, right? Get your nervous system used to being in situations like that and realizing you're not gonna die. So practicing when the stakes are low in more controlled environments can get you out there. What does not work is just imagining in your head trying to figure out the perfect thing to say or wait until you do feel amazingly strong and that's when you finally put yourself out there.
That's not how it works, right? We have to be in, in the ring practicing for that strength to be built. It can't just be all in your head. It has to be practiced out in the real world.
Rachelle Ramirez: One of the things that I've heard you say in terms of, practically, how somebody might practice that is one. Look for no, you know, try to get as many rejections as possible. You know, we know people who have said, you know, I'm gonna hit a hundred rejections this year, and they're submitting their work to agents and small publishers or fellowships or writing residencies or contests critique partners, you know, looking for as many rejection, you know, have that the actual rejection be the
Sue Campbell: Be the goal. Yeah.
Rachelle Ramirez: Yeah, yeah.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. There's a story that I love to tell that I heard a coach tell once she was supervising her daughter's girl scout troop when they were selling cookies at a grocery store, right? So you set up and the vestibule right at the entrance of the grocery store. And when they set up the table for the day and people started walking in, the girls were very tentative.
Like they didn't make eye contact. They say anything kind of stood there, this coach was like, oh, what's going on? And they're like, oh, we don't want anybody to say no. So then their answer was like, in order to not get a no, I just won't ask or won't talk to anybody, and no one will say no. And this coach was like, no, you wanna get as many nos as you possibly can.
That's the challenge. That's the game. So every single time someone says, no, I want you to like write. It down on a piece of paper, like let's keep track of how many nos you get and we wanna get as many as we can by the end of the day. And of course, when you do that, you're emboldened to start reaching out and by the end of the day, you sell a shit ton of Girl Scout cookies.
Or, you know, books as the case may be, but you're not going to sell any if you're not willing to put yourself out there. So that actually becomes the trick, is like, how do I demonstrate the resilience? Because when you do this, when you decide to be a writer, you can guarantee two things. You're gonna get ignored and you're gonna get rejected.
And those are the only possible way to get somebody to say yes is being willing to endure being ignored and rejected. So every fail gets you closer to the next pass.
Rachelle Ramirez: All right. I that is a great place I think to end on, like, look, look for actually, rather than worrying about the criticism and rejection and, and your own, what you would define personal failures, and to actually go in search of them,
Sue Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Rachelle Ramirez: is a great way for us to end here. So I wanna say thank you very much for meeting with me today. All right. Thanks.
Anne Hawley: If you'd like a weekly dose of writing insight and mindset and marketing tips in your inbox, subscribe to the Write Anyway newsletter at pagesandplatforms.com slash subscribe. And that's it for this episode of the Write. Anyway Podcast. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time.