I’m not a tough, strong individual. I don’t take criticism in stride, integrate it into my every day life, and grow and become better and never look back.
That doesn’t mean I don’t listen and learn. I do. I hear all criticism, I spend hours and days agonizing it, and I eventually make what I think are valid points a part of my life and my work. Unfortunately I also sometimes make invalid points a part of my life and work, but that’s a different story. (As in, be careful you don’t destroy your voice by letting critiques rewrite your story for you).
Because I’m this whiny, fragile creature, I’m careful about who I let read my work. I’m very, very picky. Which might lead people to think I only hand it over if I know I’m going to get praise in return.
That is so not the case. A bit of backstory. I got a critique once of a short story of mine. The story was about 2,000 words. The critique must have been at least 8,000. And there were no line-by-line notes. It told me for page after page about all the literary rules I had broken. How I had switched between third person close and third person omniscient too often. How I had used the word cacophany wrong. How my visuals were overdone. Actually, that’s a pretty good summary of what it said. But it took 8,000 words to tell me.
What it never said was whether or not the reader enjoyed the story. What their personal opinion of the tale itself was. On a technical level it picked the entire thing apart. But I still didn’t know if they felt there was anything salvagable underneath.
I see that too much in critique. I see lists of things that need to be fixed. They go on and on and on. It can be so discouraging. It’s needed, but it’s still disheartening.
The people I let read my work more than once still give me lists of things that need work. They can go on and on too. I have rambling conversations with my readers and CP’s about what needs to be corrected and why and how.
But they also tell me if the story itself is salvagable. They start with things like “You’ve got a great foundation here.” Or they end with things like “This is what worked for me and what you did well.”
But I’ll tell you what’s even more frustrating. The people who point things out in the story and don’t say if they feel it’s good or bad. “Your main character mouths off a lot.”
Yeah, she does. Do you like that? Do you hate that? Do you wish she would crawl into a hole and die? What kind of emotion did it evoke?
“Your story is a new twist on ‘country girl in the big city’, but with angels.” Yeah. It is. Are you cool with that? Does that make you want to huck the book across the room?
How does it make you feel?
Art is subjective. I think we all know that. But to me, it should also evoke emotion. A creative work of fiction shouldn’t be relegated to a clinical list of technical traits.
I want to know what you liked and didn’t like and why, and I want to know if I’m spinning my wheels going back for another revision or if you personally feel like there’s potential in there.
What do you want to know about your work?
PS: The feedback that inspired this rant happened almost four years ago. It was for the earliest version of ‘Apathy’s Hero’, so whether it had a positive or negative impact on me is still unknown. A conversation with a coworker reminded me of it this morning.
You word misuser you! (BTW unless you thought “cacophony” meant “slug monster” or something, I doubt you really used it wrong–conceivably someone could face a cacophony of…almost anything overwhelming.)
But anyway.
I want to know if my readers *like* my characters. As in, they enjoy spending time with them. I watched a mystery last night where, apart from the fact that I could solve everything before the detective, the problem was that I didn’t like the MC at all. As in, I was kind of rooting for the guy who jumped the detective and gave him a skull fracture.
So it’s important to me that my characters, flawed though they may be, are strongly sympathetic and just plain likable for the reader. I care more about this than, for instance, about having sparkling prose. (Though sparkling prose is nice too.)
If a reviewer only picks on the stuff they don’t like, and never mentions anything they do like, I feel like they hated the whole thing, even if that isn’t the case. It’s so important to point out the positives as well as the negatives so the writer doesn’t go and rip out the good parts of the story as well as the bad.
You are so right! A critique can take a lot of words, and still not be nearly as helpful as one that really tell about the emotion that the story evoked. Or to tell the things that really DID work. Or the things that took them out of the story. Every critique is definitely not equal.
A little bit of praise is really nice, but I have to admit, I’m treasuring the critical stuff more and more. The problem is, so many people don’t know enough to tear something apart, or they’re afraid of hurting my feelings. I love an honest, somewhat harsh review, even if does make me cry a little bit on the inside. It gets me that much closer to my goals.
Probably comes from growing up as a dance student. If our teachers weren’t correcting us constantly, we didn’t think they loved us.
Though, to be fair, knowing what does work can be just as valuable as knowing what doesn’t.
Some of this comes from people’s different personality styles – those who operate at more macro level and those who are only micro. The micro folks are great for editing, but a critique is not a request for editing. A critique is a request for what you asked for – overall, did you like the story, the characters? Did the tension build the way you wanted, were the twists effective, was the dialogue believable? One time at a workshop, I asked a guy to tell me which of two query letters was more effective. He proceeded to correct the margins and make line edits. So, I think we have to find the people who can be effective CRITICS and then we have to find the people – later – who can be effective EDITORS.
I completely agree with your points. I dislike posting work on a message board or participating in some online contest or blogfest, only for some participants to ONLY tell me what they didn’t like. What about telling me what you did like instead of harping on about how I tend to open books by setting up the characters and situation instead of right in the middle of action, directly telling the reader things through expository dialogue or narration, or have a deliberately slower pace at times? Effective criticism focuses on what works and what you liked, not disagreements you have with writing style or what didn’t work for you.