What was one event that made you develop a thick skin?

when i sent out a partial of my nonfiction work to an agency in the UK, and they wrote, "NO," in red ink block letters with a circle around it on the top of the page. it made me realize that no matter how personal the material is that i am writing about, the people who want to represent good work have to look at things with a healthy dose of objectivity. it reminded me that this is a business first and foremost.

Having an older brother.

I still have two of the scars.

Two older sisters did it for me - especially when the oldest writes, too. Having my work compared to hers by every teacher I had (that knew her first) taught me how to buck it up and learn to take criticism with grace and style.

I have never developed a thick skin. Every setback, every rejection makes me reevaluate what the hell I'm doing here.

Working in retail.

Being an actor.

A publisher in America accepted my book, then a couple of months later turned round and said they didn’t want it because I was in New Zealand. I'd been in NZ all along, right from the moment I sent them the MS, and they new it as well. This really p*ssed me off. If they'd just said 'we don’t want it now because we think it's not very good', I wouldn't have been so bothered. But by saying yes and then saying no, and using the fact that I wasn't in America as a reason, really got to me.

I came pretty close to chucking the whole thing in. But I had a word with myself, gritted my teeth, and sent out another load of query letters. Having been messed about like this showed me what I was up against in the publishing industry. Now my skin is thicker and my eyes are wide open.

I'm more like Shadow-Ferret. I give up too easily.

I wrote an erotic story that I thought came out very well. (My husband agreed, ) and I submitted it to a paying markets ad on this website. The woman said she wanted to buy my story and feature it and blah blah blah. I was thrilled!

I never heard anything else from her. She never returned my emails, either.

I haven't even looked at that erotic story since.

I'll have to secon chaostitan. Being a musician too, and a pretty crappy one, I can take any criticism.

Mom

1. My senior thesis proffessor. She accused me (subtly, but accused me none-the-less) of plagiarism. I had just written an especially well-worded sentence. I had no choice but to change the sentence. Oh, and she was obsessed with Nabokov. I had the same prof my junior year, and had to do a big project for her. It was a collection of short stories, and she compared every single one of them to Nabokov. To this day, I never miss an opportunity to call Nabokov a chain-smoking, egotistical, pedophile.

2. My (now defunct) blog caught the attention of a small press editor, and he asked for an essay for an anthology detailing the political and social movement opposing Bush. I spent a couple of weeks writing a memoir about how hard it is to be liberal in the reddest of red counties, getting it juuuust right. I zipped it off and got a few e-mails about how the project was progressing and it should be on the shelf by Summer or Fall of '06. In August I e-mailed the guy, asking how things were coming. He said he should come out soon. The next e-mail I sent, this time in October, asking if it would come out soon, has gone unanswered.

3. The very first short story I submitted was to Analog. I thought that none of my previous stuff was good enough, sat down, and whipped out the shittiest story ever written. No lie, when people ask me what's the worst story I've ever read, I reply "Blood Pills by M. Brandon Robbins." After the story was in the mail, I re-read and realized how bad it was. When I got the rejection letter, I wasn't upset; what upset was that I knew that I deserved it.

I don't have a thick skin. But I can put on a perfect act, then go home and cry.

Getting beat up by skinheads and then seeing the same bunch of guys over and over at shows where we did sound for other bands for like YEARS.

Actually, on hindsight, I think it was a single critique of the book. It was one of the first ones we got, and it was scathing. I remember reading the four or so pages of comments she gave back and found myself really getting angry with them. I set them down for a couple hours and realized that I wasn't angry so as much picking up her anger--the critique was very, very angry. She didn't just not like the book; she despised it. Evidently, she couldn't understand why, so she attacked it. It turned out she was vehemently anti-gun, and well, it was a thriller, and it was set during the Civil War. Guns were kind of important in the story. She stopped reading right on the page where one character drew a gun on another (which, despite all the revisions, is still in the book, by the way).

Since then, if I hear someone reacting badly--and there's been four or five--I know it's not the book; it's something that got under their skin.

I have two older brothers. When they weren't trying to skewer each other they would turn their evil imaginations on me. The first one to make me cry won the game. They stopped playing this hideous game when I turned 7 and I learned how to make them cry.

adolescence, high school english teacher, high school boys, high school friends, living alone, living with roommates, having a class in which you are quite certain you are the dumbest in the room, having a professor who is quite certain you are the dumbest in the room, first year teaching, graduate school, seven+kids, moving, life gives you lessons on how thick your skin has to be, but every once in a while, you forget. And that forgetting is also a good thing.

I'm actually an easy target. It hurts to be rejected, even if it is deserving.
The important thing is to keep at it, even when it hurts.

Well, rejection hurts and there's no way around that. I don't have a thick skin so much as I have a protective set of armor that I wear when I think I'll need it. But I forget it sometimes, too. And the arrows can still get in.

Kate Thornton said:

I don't have a thick skin so much as I have a protective set of armor that I wear when I think I'll need it. But I forget it sometimes, too. And the arrows can still get in.

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Same here. When I'm in a critique group or somewhere I expect to get negative feedback and even want it, I know to wear the metal skin. But, if my husband reads something and tells me it's cheesy before I'm ready to hear it, I'll come crashing down.

Reading my first bad review in the LA Weekly for a play I wrote. I'd had glowing reviews from other papers/magazines, so this one just stung. I try to remind myself that upon research I discovered that the reviewer was himself a failed playwright, but still...he just HATED it. But I got over it, and each rejection is a little easier.

But still not easy. About a year ago I was chatting casually with a literary agent at a writer's event and he asked me about my book. I already have an agent, so wasn't trying to pitch to him, and yet he told me my idea was crap and that it was boring. Um, thanks. My agent doesn't think so. I didn't say as much, though, I just thanked him for his feedback and walked away. It stung, though, particularly since I wasn't looking for his opinion to begin with--I was chatting with him because I know his wife.

chaostitan said:

Working in retail.

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Oh, yeah. That'll do it.

Taking escalations in a call center.

People yelling at you because they didn't think something through and now they think they've lost tens of thousands of dollars and want you to fix it-- and give them the money.

Take 500 of those and see how much anything else will bother you.

When I was very young, I told my mother I wanted to write a novel. She told me I was just copying my older brother. This put me off writing for some time. (In her defense, I did tend to copy my brother when I was younger)
Then, when I was about fifteen, my uncle asked to see a story I had been writing last time he had seen me.
Instead of asking me to get my story, my family passed him some of my older brother's work. (I still don't know why.)
Both incidents have remained with me, but helped me to develop a thick skin when regarding my work. It also helped having a wonderful father, who while the best and most fantastic guy, has a way of helping you see the flaws in things.