The Landmine of Critique

[sartorias]

Anyway, a couple of people mentioned workshopping and critiquing as a separate subject. There's been lots of discussion on these subjects (check out not only the posting but the comments that coffeeem got here).

Comments

contrary critiques

[swing_canary]

I am so glad to see someone write down what I have been thinking in writing workshops for years, and in such a short, simple sentence: "don't tell them what to do." This was the root of a disappointing workshop experience in a fiction class that I took last semester- the class (including the professor) was so engaged in making up their own "better" plots and characters for others' work that they completely neglected giving basic reactions to the original versions of the stories. When, for the end-of-term portfolio, I finally tried some of the changes that the professor had suggested (in the interest of getting a better grade) she did an about-face and said that those (her) ideas didn't work and she liked the original better

Re: contrary critiques

[sartorias]

I, in turn, am grateful that thoughtful and interesting people like you drop by to comment!

and yes, on some classes. The prof sets the tone...which sometimes can be deadly for some writers. (This was why I got out of English and into History way back in the Cretaceous period, when I was in college.)

[veejane]

My one bit of wisdom in both giving and receiving crit is, Make sure you know the audience.

With the writer not knowing his own audience, he wrote a breezy, high-level essay that didn't explain abstruse concepts. It would have been okay in a professional journal, but, he was pitching it to an educated-amateur audience. That one lack on his part, lack of audience-awareness, made my edits of the piece extensive, but it also meant that fixing that one problem throughout would make the piece quite a bit better.

That was a nonfiction situation, of course, but the same holds in fiction, I'm sure moreso in genre where the audience expectations are pretty specific. I've picked up a book where I've been in the wrong headspace for the genre, and in situations like that I just put it back down till I can think about it properly. In January, when it's dark all the time, I read 100 pages of Tooth and Claw and thought it was a horror novel; but when I picked it back up in March I realized it was something else entirely.

[twisting_path]

You just made me realize why my new crit group is working. I thought it a very odd format (unlike any I've done before). We literally sit while the writer reads what she's been written--and listen. We can take little notes as things occur to us, but otherwise, just listen. I thought it wouldn't work, but it does. One of the women in my group is 73, working on a mystery. Her first attempt at the first chapter looked great to her until she read it to us...we were able to make suggestions, and when she came back the next week, she knocked our socks off.

Sometimes...okay alot of times...I wish someone WOULD tell me what to do, but I do realize that every time that happens, I end up just totally losing all interest in what I'm working on.

[sartorias]

but I do realize that every time that happens, I end up just totally losing all interest in what I'm working on.

One reason might be, it has become their story. I had that happen once, with a collaboration--the other person abruptly started telling me what was "wrong" and what was "right" and just like that I lost interest--all my work gone, as far as I was concered. it was now her story, not ours.

[twisting_path]

Exactly. It becomes their's...and I look at this and that and I can't remember what is what...good grief.

In the last 48 hours I have gone through so much turmoil over this...and decided that the one story, that I really do love, I can and I think already have recaptured as mine. I trust my two crit partners and my partner to take care of this...for now that is all who will hear of it. What a tough lesson to learn.

c

[faerie_writer]

Jane Yolen did your first critique? Holy cow, nothing like starting at the top, eh?! ;)

[sartorias]

I'd submitted Wren to her for the Jane Yolen Books line. I was just about to give up trying for publication forever, too. I mean, I'd been at it off and on for twenty years. No, longer.

[kalquessa]

How funny, I critique in green, too, most of the time. My poor Green pen of Doom doesn't get much love since I stopped taking annoying workshop classes, though.

My best critiques always come from tiellan. She is so insightful and thorough. I met her in a workshopping/fiction writing class years ago, and we've stayed friends and kept trading drafts of stories ever since. Kim is so complete in her notes that she usually just puts stars next to items she's commenting on, and then writes the comments on the back of the page, since there isn't enough room in the margins

[sartorias]

Yeah, I've wasted a lot of hours on the applause ones...