Objectively good and subjectively your jam...

People ask me often how I get over bad reviews and keep going even when people are unimaginably cruel. It all goes back to a simple parsing of semantics we aren't taught in school.

Hi friends,

People ask me often how I get over bad reviews and keep going even when people are unimaginably cruel. I have a strategy for it, but I think it’s important to note that my initial, visceral reaction to bad reviews is still…well, bad.

I do have a secret weapon, though…

…data.

That’s right. The thing most writers opine as the bane of their existence is my savior.

I’ve given enough talks where one person ranked me as a 10 and another marked me as a 7 for the exact same metric based on the exact same content that I have come to grips with the only reasonable conclusion…reviews are subjective.

It’s to the point where I stare at the review sheet wondering what presentation certain people were watching when I see the final numbers, but their feelings are valid, so I just swallow it and move on.

I’ve seen enough people yell at me for an email while others praise me for the same words that it’s hard to take either with much rigor. These are two emails I received 30 minutes apart from two different humans. The text of the email was EXACTLY the same, and yet the responses are night and day.

How can you look at this and think anything but the universe is utter nonsensical chaos.

I’ve watched enough people bash things I love and adore things I hate to believe it’s any more than vibes. Still, I’m a data nerd at heart with a degree in sociology, so I started to think about it and realized there’s a very easy explanation for why these types of things happen.

It turns out things can be measured on two metrics; objective goodness and subjective goodness, and we’re only taught to consider the latter.

Objectively good: Something meets the minimum standards of a medium. If your building doesn’t fall down, doesn’t kill people, and has doors, rooms, windows, floors, and a roof, along with necessary appliances…it is probably objectively good. Something that “meets spec” is objectively good. If your book reads well, is well-formatted, has a well-designed cover, and doesn’t break apart when you pick it up, it’s probably reached a level of objective goodness. This metric is something we can judge and rate, but only pass/fail.

Subjective goodness: Do you actually like the prose? Does the story resonate with you? Is the building aesthetically pleasing to you? Are you moved by a piece of work? These are measures of subjective good, and almost all metrics of “good” are about subjective goodness because things that aren’t objectively good aren’t even finished.

My wife doesn’t agree with me on this, but I’m 100% sure that every industry has a degree of objective goodness baked inside of it. College in many ways can be seen as a way to impart objective goodness into students they can use as benchmarks in their own career.

If your work is objectively bad, then that’s a you problem. If your work is objectively good and subjectively not somebody’s jam, then that’s a them problem, not a you problem.

It becomes a you problem when you have to market and sell your work, but if somebody reads something and doesn’t resonate with it, then there’s nothing you can do about it. All you have control over is the work you create, not what somebody thinks of it.

The more niche your work, the fewer people will think it is subjectively good. We are never taught the difference between objective and subjective good, though, so almost everyone trashing something objectively good even though it is only subjectively not their jam.

As a writer, it’s really important to understand this distinction. I do not like Game of Thrones, but I do appreciate the objective goodness and quality of it. Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner is a brilliant book I am uncomfortable reading but appreciate for the artful way it was constructed.

As writers, we must be able to analyze things we don’t like for their objective and subjective quality. It’s one of the most important ways to improve your work. If you cannot zoom out and notice the quality of a work, you will never grow beyond what you already know.

If you want more people to think your work is subjectively good, then you should learn how to create onramps to more groups so that it resonates with more people, or find platforms where your type of work already resonates.

Kickstarter and Substack are filled with people who resonate with the subjective goodness of my work while readers on retailers do not.

You can control making something objectively good, or even a commentary of objective goodness. You cannot control whether something is subjectively somebody’s jam. You can work at making a piece of work convey the meaning you intend, but people still have to work to find that meaning.

Almost everything, though, will not be somebody’s jam any more than everything is your jam. If you can notice the way you resonate and reject these things in your own life, it can help you notice this same impulse and others.

How did you like that one?

• Do you see the separation when you look at other people’s work?

• Do you see it in your own work?

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Photo by Mario Mesaglio on Unsplash