[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]

I guess we do use it differently, since I use "negative feedback" to encompass both constructive and destructive criticism--that is, any comment that is not positive, ranging from "I hated this, never write again" to "This didn't quite work for me, here's how you can improve it." From Googling I think my usage has some support, including this example that also assumes constructive criticism to be a type of negative feedback.

That division raises interesting questions in conjunction with the rest of your comment. If someone phrased a comment more concretely or with suggestions for improvement, for instance describing why it was hard for them to get into the story and how the experience could have been improved for them, would that count as constructive criticism pointing out a fixable problem along the line of a plot hole? Or would it still count as negative feedback as you define it?