I love writing. I want to be a writer someday. Despite how lazy I can be, I’ve been working toward that goal. However, there comes a time in one’s life when they are put under scrutiny from others. A time in one’s life where they are faced with a critic who goes overboard in their analysis of you and your writing. I faced this type of critic online a few years ago, on a forum I don’t want to say the name of.

I was an innocent fourteen year old. I loved fantasy and I still do today. To me, fantasy is awesome because it offers a lot of freedom. You don’t have to stick by earth’s rules! I decided to write a short story involving my favorite genre. It involved a young girl and her pet gryphon, a creature with the head and talons of a bird and the hindquarters of another animal. They lived on a farm on a floating continent with the girl’s parents. The girl was a messenger angel in a nearby town and the gryphon was the farm’s mascot. The girl had come home with some food for herself and the gryphon. When her parents fell asleep, they cooked the food over a fire pit in her room. Afterwards, the girl cleaned the pit and covered it with a bedsheet. Then they went to bed and the story ended.

Now I admit, it wasn’t the best story. I might have been rushing when I was writing it. I was also excited from finishing a writing piece about something I love, which I rarely do. I decided to post this story on the unknown forum I mentioned earlier. People responded as soon as an hour after I did, and they gave me suggestions on how to improve the story. These ranged from adding more detail, which I suck at, to getting rid of some awkward dialogue. I was happy to get advice from people and went to fix my piece as needed. That all was about to change.
One person came in and began to rip my piece apart. I don’t remember their gender, but they proceeded to break the story into little parts and criticize each bit. They could’ve just given me a few simple suggestions on how to improve and I would’ve taken them. Nope, they went full stop to destroy my writing. When I saw their post, I wanted to hide under my bed. I’m the type who gets nervous easily. When I’m pushed to my limits, I can get upset enough to cry.

The person took my getting nervous as me hating them and their criticism. They got angry at me. They called me out for having an “ego”. They turned the other posters who had been nice to me against me. What had been an innocent short story about a young girl written by a young girl turned into a thread of people throwing tantrums because I didn’t take that one poster’s criticism.

I wasn’t confident enough to face them and explain myself because of how they reacted to me. I felt that trying to fight them on this matter would only make things worse. Instead I ran and abandoned my account and the story. After that incident, I was scared of any and all criticism. I refused to show anyone anything I coached myself to write afterwards. I didn’t get over that one incident for months.

The moral of this story? If you have an issue, get it out. Don’t let it be like Three’s Company where people get into crazy situations because of misunderstandings. If I had explained myself beforehand or during the critiques, maybe what happened to me afterwards wouldn’t have been so painful. Maybe I could’ve been writing about a girl and her gryphon having adventures today instead of a story about a boy running from his homeland because of an egotistical “goddess”. ...Not like I hate that old story now. I have a character and a dragon who develop a similar bond to the girl and gryphon’s in that story, so it could be said that I took inspiration from my old writing.