[PUBLIC POST] Criticisms of your writing

[ljwrites]

To members: Sorry I completely forgot about this week's midweek Open Chat. I was going to space it out from the last one, and then I got absent-minded, and now it's a bit too late. I'll resume next week, and schedule a post in advance so I don't forget.

To everyone: Let's talk about criticism, specifically criticism of your writing. Some questions to get you started:

- How do you generally respond to negative feedback?
- What's a piece of critical feedback that was painful to you?
- Did criticism help you, and how?
- What was an unhelpful piece of criticism?
- Have you make any changes in response to negative feedback?
- What do you think constitutes helpful negative feedback?
- Giving criticism can be as tricky as receiving it. Do you have any techniques for giving effective criticism?

Feel free to answer one or more of these questions, or to relate any other anecdotes or thoughts about critical feedback.

We'll cheer ourselves up next week with the flip side of this post, positive feedback, so stay tuned for that!

Comments

[jae]

I actually love critical feedback as a general rule, though that general rule has many caveats.

Mostly, I feel especially good about negative feedback if it is solicited, i.e. if I have asked a particular person whose skill set I respect and trust to comment on a draft of a work. Under those circumstances, my "skin" grows very "thick" because I have faith that the person in question is working hard to make my piece as good as it possibly can be. I know that they want to help me, and I'm happy that they're devoting their own time and talents to making that happen.

I have never been in a position of receiving unsolicited professional reviews of any fiction I've written, but I think once I got over the initial shock/discomfort of receiving negative feedback that wasn't specifically aimed at working with me to make a piece better, I'd probably be fine with that sort of negative feedback, too. I think it would definitely take some getting used to, though, and my ability to take it in stride would likely have a lot to do with how much I trusted that particular reviewer's opinions.

I have had a few chances to read unsolicited negative comments about things I've written in other people's online spaces (like in people's livejournals, back in the day), and while that's sometimes smarted a little, I was never hugely bothered by it. Mostly because they were all at least partly right. ;) I prefer the solicited, constructive kind of negative feedback to this, of course, but this sort of thing can actually be helpful, too, even if that wasn't the original intention.

The sort of negative feedback that does bother me is negative comments that are actually attached to the story itself (for example in the fanfiction world, comments on the Archive of Our Own). I am generally pretty bothered by the way fannish culture practically prohibits saying anything negative about fanworks, but I'm actually grateful for that cultural tenet when it comes to story comments. It just feels really different to me for someone to say something negative about my story in their own online space, or in a published place, than it would feel to have those exact same comments on the story itself, for anyone to read who happens to stop by later. I would be incredibly bothered by that (and I'd also find it really unhelpful), so I'm glad it's a rare occurrence in fandom, even if I'm not down with the reasons why it is.

I would also be upset by any negative feedback that was intended to ridicule or make fun of my work. I'm glad that this has never happened where I could read it, because I don't think I'd deal well with it at all.

So how I respond to negative feedback depends completely on the situation, but the vast majority of the negative feedback I've received falls into the first category. My response to that sort of negative feedback is generally to feel really grateful for the energy the person is willing to devote to my story, and get fired up about making their suggested changes (or working with them to figure out a different set of changes that work for both them and me). Everything I've ever written has been made better by that sort of negative feedback, and I'm very glad there are people willing to give it.

-J

[ljwrites]

That's a good point about the different contexts of criticism. I think the first kind, the solicited comments from known and trusted people, are the most helpful but at the same time make me the most nervous because I'm pretty sure that anything negative they say will be right. It's a defensive reaction, one that I get over with time, but hoo, getting a beta-reader's note or e-mail can send a thrill of fear through me.

Interesting point about comments attached to the story, since it's also the kind that I'm the most used to (generally on fanfiction.net) and I've never minded if the comments are negative. In fact I've received one that more or less said my story was pointless and boring and I didn't mind that one much, either. Though I'm careful to frame my own criticism in a more constructive way than that reviewer did--and if I don't have anything nice to say I don't comment at all--I do leave critical comments on stories. However, I usually send a private message for smaller fixes like typos and grammatical errors (since it would be awkward to have those hanging around in public after the problems were fixed), not to mention more extensive discussions of the story in question. You wouldn't believe how deeply I got into issues of colonialism and manifest destiny with a friend over a story of his. :D