Writing Career Advice From a Neuroscientist Part 4: Don't Take Criticism Personally

This is part 4 of a 4 part series about career advice my graduate adviser gave to his graduate students and postdocs. His advice is for people pursuing an academic science career, but I'm sharing the ones that also apply to writers.

Part 1: Choose your projects carefully
Part 2: Know the literature
Part 3: Don't spread yourself too thin

Part 4: Don't take criticism personally, and respond professionally

Few things are as hard on a scientist's self esteem as the peer review process. Whether for grants or for papers, you can expect to get emails from anonymous reviewers whose job is to scrutinize your baby and dig out all its flaws. While it's tempting to shoot back a response insulting your reviewer's intellect and mentioning how you'd like to see THEM come up with a better experiment, that is very unlikely to help you in the long term – especially since these people
have the power to accept or reject your grant or paper. It's better to walk away for an hour or two, recollect, and then respond professionally and appropriately.

I think writers have it easier in this sphere. Yes, there are snarky and hurtful reviews, but often, critiques are well intentioned and are actually trying to help improve the piece. So when you get some suggestions that batter your ego, don't take it personally. Step back, take a deep breath, evaluate, and then decide on the appropriate response.

For something from the agent's perspective, here are some funny rejection stories from agent Jessica Faust, as well as a more serious post about burning bridges.

That's the end of the neuroscience/writing career advice series. Thoughts? Are the two career paths similar, or are these analogies a stretch?

Writing Advice from a Neuroscientist Part 3: Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin

This is part 3 of a 4 part series about career advice my graduate adviser gave to his graduate students and postdocs. His advice is for people pursuing an academic science career, but I'm sharing the ones that also apply to writers.

Part 1: Choose your projects carefully
Part 2: Know the literature

Part 3: Don't spread yourself too thin, especially early on in your career

There's so many interesting topics in neuroscience that it's tempting to investigate them all! However, that's a bad idea for two reasons. First, as a young inexperienced scientist, it's hard enough to stay on top of the literature for one topic, let alone two. Second, you want to become well known and established in your subfield. Publishing two papers on memory and two papers on schizophrenia doesn't make you twice as impressive. It just makes you half as impressive to the memory and schizophrenia communities as you would have been if you had focused on one topic.

Likewise, as a young author, it may be tempting to genre hop. This is a bad idea for analogous reasons. First, it is easier to “keep up with the literature” in one genre as opposed to trying to understand the conventions, traditions, and unique challenges of multiple genres. Second, skipping from genre to genre takes away from your ability to build a solid fan base in one genre. You split your efforts, and you may end up with a weakly formed fan base in two genres, rather than a strong fan base in one. For more on genre hopping, read this blog entry from agent Nathan Bransford.

And finally, part 4.

Writing Career Advice from a Neuroscientist Part 2: Know the Literature

This is part 2 of a 4 part series about career advice my graduate adviser gave to his graduate students and postdocs. His advice is for people pursuing an academic science career, but I'm sharing the ones that also apply to writers.

Part 1: Choose your projects carefully
Part 2: Know the Literature
When designing a new experiment, you need to be caught up on the field. There's no point in conducting an experiment to show something we already know, and there's no point in testing a hypothesis that can't possibly be true.

While it may be easier to write a novel than do neuroscience in a vacuum, you'd have a much better chance of publishing it if you research the market and know what is currently selling. This doesn't mean that we should all be writing teen-vampire-wizard-catholic-church-conspiracy stories, but it does mean that we need to have a good sense of general market trends.

Don't take my word for it though. Here are some interesting blog entries from people who actually know what they're talking about.

1. Agent Jessica Faust on representing books that are different.

2. Agent Rachelle Gardner on whether you should write what's hot.

3. Eric at Pimp My Novel had an excellent series on genre specific book sales.

Stay tuned for Part 3...

Writing Career Advice From a Neuroscientist, Part I: Choose your Projects Carefully

As a graduate student studying the brain mechanisms of reading, I'm blessed with a pretty awesome day job (or more accurately, “afternoon, evening, and weekend job”). My adviser is a tenured professor at MIT and occasionally gives graduate students advice on building a scientific career. Not only is his advice spot on, but I've realized that many of his tips apply to building a writing career as well. His tips are the inspiration of this four part series: Writing Career Advice From a Neuroscientist


Tip #1: Choose Your Project Wisely

Before I came to my current lab, I worked as a behavioral psychologist -- I made people do experiments on computers and measured their responses and how quickly they responded. Behavioral experiments are very fast paced -- you can finish an experiment in a week if you work quickly. Because of the small time commitment, the cost of not planning a good behavioral experiment is minimal. If you have a crazy idea, just run a couple of participants and see if it works. Worst case scenario, you lose a few weeks and maybe the $100 that you paid your participants.

When I moved into my current lab, I started with the same mentality of just grab a crazy idea and dive in. However, I quickly learned to slow down and think things through more carefully. Why? Because now I was working in brain imaging. Rather than $100 and a few weeks, you're now talking $20,000 and months or years. An average brain imaging experiment takes about two years from conception to publication if everything goes well. Assuming that your professional life lasts 50 years, every experiment is four percent -- a significant chunk -- of your working life. Therefore, it's important to think before diving in. There's nothing worse than looking back and realizing you would have saved two years of work if you had just thought things through.

Writers would be wise to also consider the time investment factor when planning their projects. If you're just writing a short story, there's no harm in sitting at your computer and typing out any crazy idea you have. However, a novel can take anywhere from six months to several years to complete. It's not so bad to finish a short story and realize it's it's the dumbest thing ever written. However, it's a much worse feeling to finish a 90,000 word manuscript, and only then realize that your premise doesn't work or isn't publishable.

So how to you tell if something is worth working on? Stay tuned for Part II...