My mother works as a school substitute, so I often hear stories about children who have behavior issues. One particularly common theme is that the children who have only one parent or who have irresponsible parents that don't give them attention will act out in order to receive attention from their teachers, even if it's being scolded or yelled at.
It's an interesting piece of psychology here. Humans would actually prefer to be hated than to be ignored.
And this is something that I noticed pretty recently in my own journey as an author.
I started receiving a bunch of comments on one of my stories. Now, mind you - this was some stuff that I had written a while back. Stuff that I know wasn't very good, or that I could definitely have improved upon. Not saying that my current work is good, but I've at least improved enough to recognize that my old work was bad.
Obviously, these comments were harsh. I didn't feel like they were particularly hateful, but they definitely were very critical of my story. And perhaps if it were a few years ago, I would have been really saddened or depressed to see such comments. But I'm an engineer, and I've been working for a couple years now. And if there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that people will criticize you for anything and everything, and that criticism isn't something you can avoid. Rather, whenever you do something, you should just wait for the criticism, evaluate it and determine if it's legitimate or not, and then try to improve.
So naturally, I read it and didn't really feel anything. "Yep. He's right here. Ah, I disagree with this, but that's his opinion."
But eventually the comments stopped.
Now that they've stopped, I can't help but feel a bit disheartened that I'm back into the state where I receive almost no comments - ever. And I am beginning to understand what these children go through when their parents ignore them or view them as a burden, and why they act out to receive even negative attention.
The lesson here? If you're a reader and you enjoy the stories you're reading, let the author know! Make some comments and interact! As author's, we should be writing for ourselves and out of our own motivation to create a good story, but having encouraging readers sure as hell makes it feel worth all the effort.
