Hey up all!

Quick apology again for failing to make one of these last weekend – there’s a previous post summarising that and inviting some artistic suggestions. Won’t repeat any of that for you sake (it’s bloody boring), so let’s just jump right into something that I myself have found quite relevant recently – CRITICISM!

Very scary!

The art of tolerating other people’s opinions.

Writing for yourself only is only ever good for brainstorming and practise – if you want to make anything worthwhile, even if not intending to publish, you will need to consider the suggestions of others. It is a perfectly human response to feel apprehensive about having others scruitinise what you’ve made. There is always a fear that your peers will ridicule the prose you’ve put weeks of effort into and pick-apart your hard wrought plot.

But you know what I’m going to say to that? If you don’t want to construct your narrative in the dark, where mismatch and mistake is nigh inevitable, you need to face the searing light of criticism. Good feedback often stings as much as over-biased, spiteful mockery because it forces you to reflect on the fallibility of ideas and restart what you’ve written. To process criticism, however, you will need to harden your skin and learn to tolerate what other people think. If you refuse this social aspect of the development process…well, sorry to point fingers, but you will end up with something like Norman Boutin’s “Empress Theresa”. Do a bit of wider reading for me and look into that rather controversial novel.

Before we get into that, one must seek out a viable critic. It’s a general rule of thumb that the more diverse and numerous your reviewers, the more extensive (and valuable) the depth of response will be – you will have more ideas therefore to transplant at choice onto your novel. Now, it can be tempting to only seek out “experts” of the particular genre you have written. This isn’t inherently a bad idea – experts will have a more experiences understanding into what your target demographic wants and what you need to do to engage them, ensuring that your writing – if adjusted – will be well recieved. However, I find that unrelated, unexperienced peers will also offer interesting perspectives to what you’ve made, if not always very helpful. After all, you ought to accomodate people new to the genre of stories you write to maximise it’s impact, eh?

One of my best example critics is my brother; what he does is ask questions. Opinions on their own are highly subjective and, when accumulating large quantities of them, often counter-intuitive – what one person thinks is right could be another’s wrong. Mind you, if many people dislike an idea, you might need to reconsider it, but that’s not quite as constructive as recieving questions. Questions get you yourself to reflect on how the reader has understood what you’ve made – have they recieved the narrative as you’ve intended? Questions are also less likely to touch a raw nerve as they’re not outright calling something you’ve written good or bad. However, in my brother’s case, he’s not afraid to ask questions about the wider subtext of the story – what shaped this character? Why are you focusing on them at this point in the story? What does the moon symbolise in the boating scene? What the hell are you trying to describe?! Questions, while they may not provide direct solutions to problems, are always helpful, so try and request any proofreaders to focus on asking them.

Now,it’s probably worth talking about what you do with the criticism you recieve. Remember to be polite to the people reviewing what you’ve written – discuss their statements calmly and, if you feel like you need to correct them, do it gently. After recieving criticism, it’s best to leave it a day or two to mull the advice over – this will give yourself time to think about what you’ll actually do with it. It also helps to wait a while before responding to criticism if it’s text based to make sure you’re not hot headed about the time. Remember when making refinements that you are ultimately the decider here. You choose what changes you make to your story and it can be accordance to other people’s suggestions. If one piece of feedback is really hard to amend while keeping your vision of the narrative, disregard it for now…but don’t forget it. You might work it into the story in future, when your own concepts have changed…

Well, that’s the basics down for criticism. I’ve found that discussing this has been helpful, since dealing with feedback has been very relevant for me at the moment. I’ve gotten a lot of thorough feedback from some people who reviewed my taster and have decided to put off advancing the story to refine some areas that just didn’t work. If you took the chance to read what I posted, you might’ve had problem understanding a lot of the scientific or downright alien concepts in my story – I admittedly did not consider properly anchoring the reader when writing my story. Chapter 1 (after the prologue) was decidedly the worst, as well as having a really baffling perspective…so I’ve decided to rewrite it entirely! I’ll admit, I found it uncomfortable having my work dissected – my brother was especially cold – but I’ve heard lots of positive things all the same. Be reassured that critics will often say good things about your drafts: you can’t have done everything wrong!

Anyhoo, sorry this is a bit late again. Care to critique my critique on critique? No? Suit yourself.

Have a nice evening! Don’t ever stop writing.