By Samantha Ladwig
“Do you ever read the comments?” I’m always asked – usually towards the end of a session – when I teach a workshop on pitching.
For a long time, I said, “No, and you shouldn’t either.”
My experience with comments is that, if I’m not prepared for the negative ones, looking at them at all, even if they’re overwhelmingly positive, sucks the initial excitement out of the otherwise pleasurable experience: an editor accepting a draft, taking and shaping it into something I’m even prouder of, and scheduling it for publication.
I approach my essay’s “live” date as the day it stops being mine and starts being the readers (if anyone is interested, of course).
But I’m not immune to my own curiosity, so occasionally I break my own rule and have a peek.
I recently published an essay with Literary Hub about my experience buying and running a bookstore at age 29, in the county with the highest ratio of senior citizens in Washington State. It’s a piece I’m proud of, that I felt I needed to write, but one that I was nervous to see out in the world because it dealt with my own community.
The morning it went live, I let those nerves steer me, unthinkingly, towards the comment section. Per usual, on a site that receives a mixed bag of intentional readers and anonymous trolls, the first commenter wasn’t a fan. In just one second, after hours spent working on an essay that came to me two years before I was able to write it, the joy of seeing it in the world vanished. I spent the day kicking myself for not pausing before clicking open that essay’s comments section.
When I’m asked whether I look at the comments, my impulse is to say no because I want to spare my workshop students the distraction of that experience. The approval to lean into, especially in the beginning when emotions are high, should come from the editors who’ve selected and molded the essay for their publication, not random readers inhabiting a space often open to anyone, anonymous or otherwise, good intentions or bad.
The students who ask me whether I read comments do so in hushed tones, as if my confessing that “yes, sometimes I do” is admitting that I’m not as good a writer as they want me to be, or the kind of writer they aspire to be, someone so confident in their craft that they don’t need anyone’s approval.
Maybe the question isn’t whether I look at the comments, but rather have I risen above creative anxiety. I don’t know anyone who has.
It’s natural to want your writing to connect with a reader. And it’s natural to fear that it never will.
I’ve been writing professionally for a decade now and have witnessed a full spectrum of reactions. My writing on family estrangement went viral, receiving thousands of comments and reshares with one person going as far to say that it was the only Vice article they’ve read that wasn’t followed by a barrage of hatred. On the opposite end of the good/bad spectrum, as a movie critic for a male-dominated outlet, my mediocre review of the 2016 Warner Bros. animated film Storks upset readers so much that they took it to Reddit where I watched enraged men talk about me in unsettling ways.
Rarely does a work elicit these extreme responses. A lot of the time it’s some nameless person jumping between essays, telling people they used an apostrophe incorrectly.
There are wonderful comment sections out there. The Brevity Blog , for instance, has an engaged community made up of writers who enjoy reading about their craft. Substack is another excellent resource that lends itself to meaningful connection between author and reader. It’s not that everyone is fawning over the work, it’s that the commentary is deliberate. That makes all the difference.
Now, when students ask that question, I’m more transparent. I tell them it depends on the work, the publication, my emotional state. “I try not to,” I say, “but sometimes I do.” ___
Samantha Ladwig’s writing has been published by The Cut , Vulture, Literary Hub, Vice, Real Simple, Bustle , The Brevity Blog, and elsewhere. She reviews books for BUST magazine and co-owns Imprint Bookstore in Port Townsend, Washington. Find her at samanthaladwig.com
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