Any good writer understands the need for figuratively thick skin. Our stories, poems, essays, and novel manuscripts are routinely hacked and slashed with the dreaded editor’s pen, and almost any famous author, from J. K. Rowling to Stephen King, had to experience dozens or even hundreds of rejections before hitting the big one.

I have tried to remember all of this throughout my relatively brief writing career. Enrolling in a Writer’s Workshop program (quick plug right here: http://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-com...) means writing weekly pieces that come under the scrutiny of a group of your equally skilled and talented classmates, as well as a professor who has spent more time studying his or her craft than you have spent living past puberty. It means exposing yourself to people who know or are at least learning to know what works in a piece of writing and what doesn’t. It means holding out your throat and hoping your fellows don’t tear into it too viciously.

I have indeed developed the requisite thick skin. The Bully Buster was rejected twice before WestBow took a look at it, and I have yet to submit any of the short stories I have written in the last two-odd years because I’m still improving the manuscripts based on classmate critiques. This week, however, I was thrown off my game. Going through the various copies of a blank verse poem I had written for my Fundamentals of Poetry class, I noted many of the attributes described during the workshop: “good framework,” “playful and witty,” “really relate to this one,” “loved this [verse],” “this part made me think,” even a “hell yes” to a Faust reference. A couple classmates even wrote out the scansion (the measure of a poem’s accentuation to determine the meter) and complimented me on how well I executed the iambic pentameter. The professor himself commented both in person and on the page that he could hear the iambs throughout; high praise indeed, and it made me glow on the inside.

But as I flipped the pages and noted the comments, one critique stuck out to me. Scrawled in black pen and unsigned, it said, “More Iambs & pentameters…seemed no desernable [sic] pattern.” In that moment when my eyes fell upon the words, it didn’t matter that the other fifteen or so people in the class, including the professor who has taught poetry for countless years, had specifically complimented my ability to keep to the meter. It didn’t matter that, on the whole, I had written a decent poem that made a lot of folks smile. All that mattered to me was this one arrow that cut through the others’ words and planted itself in my gut. I tried to focus on the compliments I had been paid, but my mind kept coming back to that absurd, poorly written criticism.

I almost wanted to take out my own black pen and write something along the lines of, “Maybe I’ll take your comment seriously when you learn how to spell” beneath the critique. Fortunately, I realized just how petty this was. Even more fortunately,  I read this wonderful Art of Manliness article the very next day: “Never Complain; Never Explain” (http://www.artofmanliness.com/2016/02...). It urges readers to follow the eponymous maxim of the legendary British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who understood that his energies were better spent improving himself and actually accomplishing things rather than stooping down to answer senseless critics who would only them drag him down to their level.

Socrates said, more or less, that a truly wise man understands the limits of his knowledge. From this, we can infer that to listen to those who have different perspectives and levels of knowledge and experience is the height of wisdom. However, that doesn’t mean that every single criticism should be answered or even taken seriously. Whoever wrote those words on my poem, for instance, was incorrect; my poem, as noted by several others, did in fact follow iambic pentameter, though not perfectly all throughout–what can I say, even Shakespeare cheated the meter when he had to–and it used that pattern to convey its message. It makes no sense to give credence to a criticism that is blatantly wrong, and so I have finally convinced myself to ignore it.

The only reason I’ve gone back to the incident at all is that I hope that the writers out there who may read these words, or even the non-writers who still face a good deal of criticism in their professions, will take heart in knowing that even though we may stumble and feel personally affronted by criticism, as ill-founded and illogical as it may be, we can still brush ourselves off, remember Disraeli’s words, and carry on in the mission of improving ourselves and improving our craft.