[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

[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