Thin Skin, Big Lebowski

Getting feedback, critiques, and reviews--and why thick skin won't save you (but The Dude might.)

Events are starting to come together for my upcoming novel, Our Narrow Hiding Places, on sale 8/13. I’ll email everyone once the full tour is set, but in the meantime, you can find upcoming events on my website.

I also have a new essay up on LitHub this week for Bloomsday, about a Ulysses Reading Group I started in 2004.

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As the publication of my new novel fast approaches, I’ll confess to feeling some gut-level dread—even though this is a moment I’ve been working steadily towards for years, and even though I am also, simultaneously, thrilled beyond belief that it's happening.

When I think about what exactly I’m so nervous about, it isn’t really that the novel will sell zero copies, or that it somehow secretly sucks… I can easily convince myself that these aren’t particularly realistic outcomes.

No, the dread comes from something that is not just probable, but inevitable—like winter to Westeros, like death and taxes…

The bad review will come.

It just will. Think about it. There is always someone who doesn’t like what other people like. That’s not just human nature, it’s the nature of art. People who love art often also love to be contrary. To some, the fact that any piece of art is pleasing to many, many people, is actually the reason to insist it be reconsidered. That's actually a very healthy part of any vibrant artistic community… even when the bad review comes on a Tumblr called “Books and Bowel Movements” and involves Disney GIFs (I wish I was kidding—thankfully, I believe this one is lost to the ages already.)

And no one's word is law. It’s just reality that for every great masterpiece out there, from the Sistine Chapel on down, there’s someone who looked at it, grunted, and said, “Thanks, I hate it.” But that doesn't mean it actually sucks.

I’ve been lucky to receive tons of positive, encouraging reactions from readers. And I wish I could tell you that on sleepless nights I lie awake thinking of all those many positive responses I’ve gotten from critics and readers, but you know that’s not true.

It’s the handful of total pans, the couple of brutal eviscerations, the sprinkling of stinging rebukes that I can’t get my brain to stop re-running in HD.

After eleven years at this, maybe I’ve gotten a little better at forgetting those stinkers, mostly just because time has passed—still none of that helps much in gearing up for the stray blows that will, sure as sunshine, land at some point in the coming months.

So how do we, as writers and artists, prepare ourselves for negative reactions? Most importantly, how can we dust off our scuffed egos and get back to the keyboard again?

I think the answer, for me, at least, lies in an obscure little film called The Big Lebowski.

I’ll explain.

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Before the summer of 1998 I had never really showed any of the stories I’d written to anyone. Two or three I’d turned in as assignments in English classes, one or two I’d shown to girls I had crushes on, hoping they’d think I was artsy or cute or something (didn’t work). Twice I’d written with a friend—first, a fantasy novel that we sent to TSR and was kindly rejected, and second, a few episodes of a TV sitcom we sent to CBS and were also kindly rejected.

But that was what I expected would happen. It wasn't exactly devastating.

Then, the summer I turned 16 I went to the Brown University summer writing program, for the first time in my life I was part of a “workshop”—meaning that I had to share my work with my classmates and my professor—the brilliant, gentle Thomas Glave—and get real feedback on my writing, live and in-person, while sitting around a conference table at an Ivy League institution.

And though Glave made the class fun and warm, and I had made friends with many of the others in my group, I was still pretty nervous.

In the end, the workshop itself was fine. People made some thoughtful critiques of my story and most seemed to like it a lot. Because Glave set the right tone and managed the discussion well (not the case with many of my later workshop leaders) the experience was far from bruising.

After class, and dinner, my friends and I walked down Thayer Street to the Avon and caught a double-header: The Big Hit (an action comedy, starring Mark Wahlberg) and The Big Lebowski.

It was my first Coen brothers film, eminently quotable and original and weird. I loved that, though Lebowski spends most of the movie bumbling and fumbling around in a rich mess of someone else’s detective story, he always managed to dust himself off (literally covered in ashes at one point) and resume his happy existence.

He just keeps on keeping on, only ever aspiring to end up right back in his familiar bowling alley, with his White Russian and his rug-that-ties-the-room-together, even after being chased around by porn producers, conceptual artists, and deranged nihilists. His eternal mantra, delivered with grace, each time someone else pressures or provokes him: “The Dude abides.”

What does it mean, to “abide”? I’d always thought of it as a kind of “tolerating.” When Lebowski says that he “abides” the shenanigans around him, I thought he was saying that he was just withstanding it all. A kind of passive resistance. When someone says “I can abide that,” it can mean, “I can tolerate it.”

But “abide” can also mean something subtly different: “to accept or act in accordance with (a rule, decision, etc.).”

When The Dude says he “abides,” what he’s saying is that he’s choosing (actively) to roll with whatever has come his way. Life's full of good surprises and bad ones. Whichever life has dealt him today, he’ll abide. It isn’t about tolerating it so much as going with the flow.

That, I think, is the key to surviving the review process. It’s happening. Good or bad… really good and bad, we should abide it. Accept it and move on in accordance with it.

Easier said than done, of course.

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Almost every creative writing program revolves around workshopping. From that first pre-college workshop, I would continue in one kind of workshop or another for the next eight years, all through college and then graduate school.

Unfortunately these workshops were not always as well led as the one Glave ran that summer—in fact many were fairly brutal.

If you haven't had the pleasure, imagine working hard on something for weeks, sharing it proudly with your professor and classmates, only to then sit there for an hour while they discuss in great detail why they hated it.

Worst of all, the traditional workshop “Cone of Silence” rule dictates that you, the writer, must sit quietly the whole time and listen—you are not to be addressed directly, or asked questions, or given any opportunity to defend your work. You just sit there and take it—praise or humiliation—your job is to take notes and say “thank you” at the end.

Theoretically, the person in charge of the workshop is supposed to keep your classmates focused on the text and being constructive. They’re supposed to stop them from indulging in personal attacks… but a few professors had a tendency to give way too much leeway, resulting in some really harsh piling-on.

Now, most people, writers or not, don’t like to receive criticism, even when it is constructive. Sometimes we’ll lash out in reaction, as a kind of self-defense. Sometimes we’ll absorb it and allow it to decrease our sense of self-worth. Sometimes we see it as a confirmation of the flaws we already believed we had, but hoped others might not realize.

And sometimes we are able to see it as an opportunity to improve ourselves—this is the idea behind workshopping—but even then, that doesn't mean it is pleasant.

But what if writers and artists, more than most people , make their way in the world by enhancing and relying on their innate sensitivities? We train ourselves to look harder, feel deeper, care more, to empathize, dissect, ruminate. These attitudes help us create better work, but they may also leave us with a thin skin. A tendency to take things personally, to dwell on our emotions, to become frustrated or aggravated.

Writers will also often have big egos and may, as I mentioned earlier, be prone to react defensively in the face of criticism—this is one major justification given for the “Cone of Silence.” It is supposed to prevent the workshop from breaking out into an argument or a fight.

Lately, many workshop leaders, including myself, have come to see the CoS as a flawed design, in particular because it can silence the voices of marginalized writers in the classroom who may want or need to offer context around their work, especially when their classmates don’t have the same kinds of lived experiences as they do, or who are writing towards different audiences than the writer. (See Matthew Salesses excellent Craft in the Real World for more on this.)

The second frequent argument in favor of the CoS is that it is meant to prepare a writer for a future publication experience—meaning that in workshop we are also learning what it is like to get real reviews from real critics someday.

A “real” writer in the real world does not get to walk into the living rooms of their readers and tell them that they’ve misunderstood this or that element of the story. We cannot explain our work, the point goes, and so it must explain itself. When I was a student there was barely such a thing as email, and certainly no social media for a writer to use as a platform to air their grievances towards their critics. You could grumble about it to your friends and family, but there wasn’t much beyond that available, unless you saw them at a party and tried spitting on them.

Today any writer with an axe to grind has a much easier time of it—you can pop onto Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok and yell back at your critics if you so choose. But I haven’t seen that ever do much for anyone other than make them seem unhinged and puerile. It might feel good to lash out in the moment, but in the long run, you’ll be better off keeping yourself in the Cone of Silence.

By keeping the CoS in place in workshop then, we are supposedly training new writers to bear up under such circumstances, and thickening their skin so that when it comes to getting panned in the Washington Post, for instance, they’ll be able to take it in stride.

I’ll confess that I certainly bought into this justification for the CoS for a long time, both when I was a student and later as a professor. I believed that, if nothing else, it simulated for a writer what it would feel like to have others discuss their work in the real world, and to be unable to interject or defend it.

I thought it really would thicken some skins, and maybe even save some careers in the long run.

And then? Well. I published a book.

Thick skin, ready for critics

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Perhaps surviving seven years of workshops did thicken my skin to some degree—by the later years I was pretty good about brushing myself off after a rough critique and getting on with my work. I learned to weigh my classmates’ opinions with a grain of salt—after all, I had read their work and seen their own shortcomings and their own preferences.

If, hypothetically, I got dinged in class for my story being “slow-paced” but that comment had come from a professor or a classmate whose stories were always, to my mind, very hyper-dramatic… then it was a bit easier to consider that their tastes may just not be in line with mine. That doesn’t mean you ignore it—just that you take it on balance. I do believe that a real benefit of workshop can be learning whose advice is worth taking and whose is not.

But the first time I received a bad review in the real world, for my first novel, none of that seemed to help at all. It didn’t help that the reviewer seemed to be perhaps off their meds that day. It didn’t help that they missed something fairly big early in the book. It didn’t help that they compared my book unfavorably to one by an author who had been writing since before I was born. Because none of that changes anything, really.

Unlike in workshop, I couldn’t simply dismiss it as one sad grump who didn’t care for my piece. This wasn’t some classmate, or even a professor we probably respected. This was someone who was widely respected, and their complaints weren’t sequestered to the workshop room—they were online and in a major publication.

I can still remember exactly where I was sitting when I read the review. I was at work, getting ready to teach a Freshman Composition class. Shaking, I walked into my friend’s office to tell him what had happened and he knew before I even opened my mouth. He had already read the review—which, it then hit me, meant that lots and lots and lots of people had. People I knew. Total strangers. Former classmates. Anybody and everybody.

And there’s just nothing you can do. It isn’t even a “cone of silence” that’s on your head anymore. It feels more like a “cone of shame” that you can’t get off. It feels like you just got hauled out to the stockades and had some day-old fruit hurled at your head. If we really want to prepare young writers for the publication experience, maybe we ought to take a field trip to Colonial Williamsburg with a crate or two of rotten tomatoes.

OK, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic (which ironically, I think was one of this critic’s complaints). My point is just that it is simply a completely different experience than a workshop.

For one thing, a workshop critique is aimed at helping a writer see opportunities for revision. You may get some useful feedback, but then what? After publication, you can't just take the book back and start trimming out what the critic didn't care for… it's too late. It's done!

For another thing, the goal of a reviewer isn’t to provide you with feedback—it isn’t about you at all, really. It’s to communicate their opinions to potential readers—to encourage or discourage them from picking the book up. The critic is not writing to you, the writer, but to your readers. That’s a whole different thing.

Workshop can be brutal and dispiriting, but you’ll always get to go again. When you get a bad read from a classmate you can say to yourself, “Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man…” but when you get a bad review in an important periodical, this is not much comfort.

A harsh review may also mean that a next time becomes less likely. Bad reviews can stop a book’s momentum, cause sales to stall, and may even pop up in the research of an editor considering your next work in the future. The best hope is that some other good review comes along quickly to bump the bad one off the top of the search results, and this is yet another reason that generally it isn’t recommended to try and quarrel publicly with the critic—you’d just be getting more people to notice it.

So what can we do?

It's finally happened, the inevitable… so… WWTDD?

The Dude Abides. You’ve got to accept the review, and act in accordance.

The critic is just doing their job. Sure, maybe they didn't have to be so mean about it, but hey, they're trying to get a dwindling audience to care about what they have to say, just like you are. Sometimes being mean is just the way they get the clicks they need to survive another day. That sucks, but, it's also not about you, really.

Don't compound the problem by lamenting you didn't have thicker skin. This was my self-critical approach early on, and it just makes it worse. Start by just acknowledging, at least to yourself, that getting a bad review really sucks. That you're not pathetic or wimpy for even caring. It sucks because you care, not because you foolishly believed you were flawless—and that's not a bad thing.

Even though, in the moment it may feel like your career is ruined, keep in mind that any one review has a short shelf life. There will be other, better ones to balance it out. And people have short memories. Time and the internet will swallow it up, if you just hold your head high and keep going.

Nobody wants to work with a bad sport. Nobody respects the writer who starts a flame war with their critic online. Spitting on them at parties, again, not advisable. Thick skin or thin, you’ve got to embody The Dude. Show everyone that you are a happy warrior. If anyone asks, you say it is an honor to have been reviewed by the publication. It isn’t about having thick skin or being tough. It’s about being bigger, being better.

Every writer you’ve ever loved has gotten a bad review, and probably they’ve gotten dozens. They didn’t let that stop them, and neither should you. We all respect that.

Is George Saunders the Big Lebowski of Arts & Letters?

In a reflection on the teachers who inspired him, George Saunders wrote about a time when one of his professors, Doug Unger, published a book and got an “unkind” review:

We are worried. Will one of us dopily bring it up in workshop? We don’t. Doug does. Right off the bat. He wants to talk about it, because he feels there might be something in it for us. The talk he gives us is beautiful, honest, courageous, totally generous. He shows us where the reviewer was wrong—but also where the reviewer might have gotten it right. Doug talks about the importance of being able to extract the useful bits from even a hurtful review: this is important, because it will make the next book better. He talks about the fact that it was hard for him to get up this morning after that review and write, but that he did it anyway. He’s in it for the long haul, we can see. He’s a fighter, and that’s what we must become too: we have to learn to honor our craft by refusing to be beaten, by remaining open, by treating every single thing that happens to us, good or bad, as one more lesson on the longer path.

We liked Doug before this. Now we love him.

My second novel got an “unkind” review that critiqued the book as “melodramatic” and called it a “tearjerker.” I was crushed. I wanted to write to the critic immediately, to say that I was sorry if my book was too sad for them, but it was inspired by my sister's death and that was pretty goddamn sad so I felt like I'd earned a little “melodrama”… but… I didn't do that. Thank God.

I took a deep breath and moved on. I reread the other, more generous reviews. Like The Dude, I abided.

A few months later, I took a second look at the bad review. This time I saw that it was also full of compliments, including comparing me to authors I really, deeply admired. I also saw a way to grow as a writer from this critique, no matter how long it took me to get another book published after that. This critic wasn’t being cruel or snarky or insensitive. They were actually being incredibly helpful.

A few months after that, I actually reached out to the critic… to thank them, sincerely, for the thoughtful read. To my surprise they wrote back and said they were happy to hear from me, that they had really liked my first book. They were in the midst of publishing their own book now and understood how hard it could be. I was happy to be able to wish them luck, genuinely, and to think maybe I’d earned a bit of respect in the long run. I respected myself for it, at the very least.

Now, when I get the late-night nervous attacks over imaginary bad reviews, I can at least see a way through it, and accept it without letting it stop me for long. In the end, what more can you hope for?

The Kris Abides.