Giving critique?

[BWFoster78]

I believe that writers need to trust their personal vision and their own skills and tastes and not alter those things to suit other people. This is what critique leads to. Writers who can't do anything for themselves.

Mythopoet,

I'm really trying to wrap my head around exactly what you believe.

Let's say you said the following:

"Brian, I read your novel, and it sucked. Adding zombies, however, would make it totally awesome!"

Let's say my reaction was, "You really need to lay off the crack, but, since you made the suggestion, I'll add zombies to my book even though I think it's a horrible idea."

I think most of us would agree that this is a bad idea. All changes to the story should be made with thoughtful deliberation, not just on a whim because someone told you to.

So what if I reacted this way, instead:

"Zombies! Totes fabu! That'd make my novel the awesome."

As far as I can tell from your posts, you'd consider me making the change a bad thing. But, if the change did make my story better, how is making my story better a bad thing?

What if we never had the original conversation and I came up with the idea of adding zombies on my own? Would that be bad because it's a change from my original concept or would it be okay as a part of my creative process? But, if that's the case, I just don't understand how the same result can be good one way and bad another...

 

[Vilya]

Critique is just about the most highly overrated thing in fiction writing these days. I'm going to go against the flow here (shock!) and say that I feel very strongly that almost all critique is very, very bad for fiction writers. But especially critique from other writers. Writing stories is NOT something that should be done by committee, which is the ultimate result of having your work "critiqued" by other writers or "professionals" in the writing industry.

Above all a writer should have a strong personal vision for the work that they do not compromise based on "critique", which is all too often what happens. The job of the first readers is simply to help the writer determine whether or not the actual written pages succeeded in conveying that vision through the narrative. Only people who can read like readers, and most writers (particularly aspiring and/or inexperienced writers) can't do that, can help with that goal.

I have to beg to differ on this point, because this is exactly how we approach things in my writing group. We go through and tell each other where we were bored, confused, or point out the things we didn't believe. We also give our thoughts that we had while reading ( a kind of stream of consciousness). All five of us are writers. We don't critique grammar, don't cross out other people's sentences and rewrite them, and we don't give unsolicited advice (of course an author is free to ask, but most of the time they just figure things out by themselves). I probably should note that we deal with mostly lightly edited first or second drafts, so the grammar critique that may be useful for later drafts isn't so useful at this stage in the editing process.

I have found it incredibly helpful to find out how well things translate from my head to the page. I know that you mentioned something similar, but I do not think it is impossible to get that kind of critique out of other writers. Most writers I know are some of the most well read, careful readers around.

 

[Russ]

Although I disagree with MP on this issue I was reading a book on writing by a writer I respect greatly this weekend, and he said something along the lines of:

"Writer's critiquing is the only place you will find the work of a non-expert, being critiqued by a group of other non-experts in the hope of turning the first person into an expert."

To which I would reply, critiquing by non-experts is to make the work as good as non-experts can make it, in the hope that experts will then take it the rest of the way.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Hands down, critique has been the single best learning method in my writing journey. I've learned from the many wonderful people who donated their time and read my rough work, spending hours combing through weak descriptions, poorly-structured paragraphs, and meandering ideas I never fully formed or allowed to wander off subject and plot point. Without those folks, I'd have never been able to look at my work through the eyes of others, and I never would have fully understood readers' needs and wants from my characters and the scenes in which plots unfold.

On the flip side, without having performed hundreds of critiques myself, I'd have remained on my earlier path, continuing to write those things I mentioned above (and occasionally I still do), but since I've read so many rough drafts, I've been conditioned to pick out weak narrative, meandering history lessons, trite dialogue, etc. When I read it, it jars me, and now I can see it all very clearly in my own rough drafts.

I reckon without critique (and I've spent hundreds of hours back and forth, and sometimes with the same people for years, trading all kinds of work), I wouldn't have had the exposure to rough work and the hands-on process I'd have if I'd only been reading polished, published/ publishable work all that time.

Critique is the best tool in my arsenal, I use it every day, and I use it to great effect. I'm not always the easiest crit partner, but I have deep respect for the folks who ask me to read for them, and the majority of those persons have expressed their gratitude I've spent my time for them, too. I genuinely appreciate every one of my crit partners and I call them my friends, and I owe them a whole lot. Without them, I wouldn't be as good as I am today, and I only hope they would say the same about having me on their team as well. I think writers helping each other is the best thing ever. We all win.

 

[Devor]

I'm all for critiques. But it's worth noting that a bad critique can really hurt. People can get you to waste time running down all the wrong things, push you into a style that you're not comfortable with, fight the fun out of your story, and give you a false sense of quality when you've fixed their often shallow comments.

You've got to be careful out there!

 

[BWFoster78]

I'm all for critiques. But it's worth noting that a bad critique can really hurt. People can get you to waste time running down all the wrong things, push you into a style that you're not comfortable with, fight the fun out of your story, and give you a false sense of quality when you've fixed their often shallow comments.

You've got to be careful out there!

I think that, as a beginner, I got pushed down a lot of false paths.

The thing is that, as a writer, I'm a result of everything I learned while doing so. How can you really figure out who you are until you've tried some stuff?

Now that I'm not as much of a newbie, it's a lot harder to lead me down any path unless I'm willing.