Dealing with critism

Nobody likes critism. It hurts our feeling and sometimes it makes us feel like giving up, like we'll never get things right. I write mystery suspense novels. That comes relatively easy to me. Writing a memoir does not. I had a file of short pieces that I've thrown together all related to my first years on earth. Making this crazy quilt file bend itself into a sensible book does not come easily to me. Recently in a writing group I was told what I already know...that my pieces need to be blended together and written in chapter form. That hurt my feelings.

Why would it do that when I already knew that is what I should do? Who knows. Anyway, I've been thinking about it. We can never make progress until we look at what we are doing wrong and improve it. I can never write a good memoir until I stop trying to do it the easy way with pieces that have already been written and get down to the harder work of treating it like a book. I'm going to start to work on that today.