CECIL CASTELLUCCI: The best writing advice that I could give to anybody is to figure out how to put your best ears on and to not be precious about your work. I think one of the hardest things as writers or as artists of any type is that you're-- it's like you're walking around with no skin on, and you're exposing yourself to the world. And it's very hard to take critiques.
And that's the most important thing, because we want our work to get better. We want to grow as artists. We want to learn and grow. But you can't grow if you feel like you're being attacked. And because you have no skin on, it hurts.
So I think the best advice is, don't be precious about your work. Be there to do your work. You're rolling up your sleeves. It's a craft. You have to get better and better and better, so you have to listen to critiques.
You don't have to take every single piece of advice that an editor says. I always try to address the notes that ring true to me. But then if everybody says, this is a problem, well, guess what? That's a problem. You've got to deal with it.
And then the other thing is that-- save every part of the buffalo. So anything that you take out of a book and that you have to cut or you have to lose your precious babies, all of that stuff-- guess what? Put it in another book. There's going to be room for it elsewhere. So I often have things that I cut out of one book, and maybe not in the same exact form, but in some way, I repurpose it to somewhere else.
So use every part of the buffalo. Learn how to put your best ears on. And then I always ask my editors to please say that I'm a genius first-- like, first sentence, "Oh, my gosh, you're a genius, this was brilliant," and then the 50 things that are wrong so that at least I can hear, because it's all about tricking myself to be able to hear what criticism is so that I can get better and I can grow.