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To survive over any length
of time, you must turn any
criticism into a strength.
If you write for any length of time, you’re going to get
slammed by a critic. Doesn’t even have to be a profes-
sional critic. It can be somebody in your writing group,
or some anonymous Internet gadfly. Or your crazy
uncle Phil.
Mickey Spillane was always being attacked by crit-
ics. In an interview, he said, “I don’t pay any attention to
them. Those guys, they get free books and then they try
to tear you down. Critics themselves, they used to tear
me up. … At one point, I was the fi fth most translated
writer in world. Ahead of me were Lenin, Gorky, Tolstoy,
and Jules Verne. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a fun-
ny thing to bring up. One day … I’m at a tea party, if you
can picture me at a tea party, and this guy comes up to
me and says ‘What a horrible commentary on the reading
habits on Americans to think that you have seven of the
top ten bestsellers of all time,’ and I looked at him and I
said, ‘You’re lucky I don’t write three more books.’”
Spillane’s wry dismissal is instructive. There are
some critics who simply tear at you, and you can and
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