Creativity Thursday: 7 Ways to Recover from a Bad Review

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The song has been written, the portrait painted or the book written, but none of these are well received.

The critics are harsh, your fans are not impressed and nothing is selling.

So what do we do?

  1. We cry—allow yourself the opportunity to mourn for the project
  2. We gather feedback—at times critics can be harsh, but are there tips that you can use in that critic.  How about the feedback from your fans?  What are they saying?bad
  3. We re-evaluate—we take the information from our critics and fans and re-evaluate that information.  What parts of this is valid?
  4. We are brutally honest with ourselves—this is difficult to be so brutally honest with ourselves about our “baby”.   Why did this not work?  Was this a pet project?  Was this a process that was cathartic or helped through grief?  Was this a project just for us?
  5. We revamp—is this something we want to improve?  Does the book or song need rewriting? Is there one particular area that needs the most work?
  6. We move on—sometimes the best thing is to move on to another project and put our failure on the backburner.   Later on we can decide if we want to revisit it.
  7. We learn from the process—life and art is a learning experience.  Not everything is going to be a hit!  In the beginning of our careers, especially, there is a steep learning curve.  What can we learn?  How can this process help us to be a better individual and a better artists?

 

How do you recover from a bad review?