To be a better writer, you have to have a sense of humor about what you do. You have to be able to poke fun at yourself. You have to be able to laugh even when your work is critiqued and you feel yourself to be a failure.
Humor is an important quality; it keeps you in balance. Without it, you become altogether too serious. The earth shatters when your article is criticized. You mope for days. You’re a beast to be around, explaining why everybody starts to avoid you in the cafeteria. Nobody wants to be around a person having a perpetual pity party.
It’s all right to be upset when your work is criticized, but you mustn’t let it determine how you act or be some sort of final word on who you are. You are more than your work. By looking at yourself with some humor, you can deflect criticism’s blows.
More than that, humor allows you to separate yourself from your work so that you’re better able to listen and learn from criticism. Humor bequeaths you a necessary distance. It grants you the ability to return to your work and murder your beloved darlings.
Humor also gives you some perspective. You begin to understand that you and your work are not the center of the universe. Time is not going to stop if one piece of writing fails. Time and life continue onward as they always have, and so will you if you keep a sense of humor.
Image: yiva (Creative Commons)