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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a few days left.]
A lot of fanworks comments that you'll see have a fairly positive aspect to them, highlighting the things that the commenter liked about the work, possibly quoting back some of the lines they liked the most or concepts and ideas they really enjoyed about the work. Yet, as we all know, there are also plenty of people who review works on places like Goodreads or the local newspaper columns that do not have nearly as nice a thing to say about some of the works they come across. I mentioned a few works that I was less fond of in yesterday's post. Someone looking at fanworks might come to the conclusion that we're all Polyannas who only like whatever it is we're reading and we don't talk about the ones we don't like.
To some degree, that's absolutely true. "Don't like? Don't read." is a thing in fannish circles, and that credo is helped significantly by the use of robust amounts of tagging, so that someone has a really good idea of what they're getting into before they even start with a work. No tag system is ever complete enough to totally warn someone away from a work they won't like, and sometimes there are works that are completely correctly tagged and there's no reason for a person to think they're not going to get something very much up their alley, and yet, sometimes a work fizzles. Maybe their three points of characterization don't match yours, maybe they've put the characters into a situation that you can't imagine actually happening, even by fandom logic. Maybe they've done something to one of the characters that defies canon, logic, and everything else and it throws you out of the story completely and you don't want to go back in. It happens.
And when it happens, someone we call it a learning moment about what we actually prefer in our works and go on from there, because there's still a lot more works to peruse and there's no sense in getting angry at one in a collection. Sometimes we post about it in our own space and we talk about what didn't work for us and we suggest that perhaps that's not a work that the people who have the same tastes that we do should examine. That's normal. This is fine.
But wait! The author of this particular work has indicated that they would like constructive criticism (or concrit) from people who are reading it. That's a free license to tell them all about the things we didn't like about their work and make dema--suggestions on how they could improve it to better suit our tastes as readers, right?
Not so much, no. Because there's an adjective modifying the word criticism, and as much as people think letting all their gripes out on an author is constructive, there's a lot more to it than that. The point of concrit is for someone to come away with more knowledge and technique that they can apply to improve their writing and its associated skills. For, say, someone writing a drabble, the skills might be figuring out how to make their prose more dense while lightening the number of necessary words to achieve the effect. For someone writing a sprawling epic, it might be advice on how to fold their worldbuilding into the narrative more, so that they're not taking chapter-long breaks so that an epic poem tangentially related to the story getting told can get included in the novel. And for a lot of people, it might be a suggestion or two on how to make their sex scenes sing better. (Mostly because writing descriptive sex scenes is fucking hard, as Sailor Jim will attest. (That piece is reproduced in other places around the Interwebs, if the color scheme doesn't work for you.)
More often than not, concrit is the sort of thing that you need specific space rules for to avoid it devolving into less constructive things, and because occasionally you need, as an author, to be able to accept the criticism as trying to make the work better, rather than as some sort of character attack on you or confirmation that your skills aren't actually any good and you should give up now. Our creations are personal, to greater and lesser degrees, and it's very easy to take "this work has issues" to mean "you are a terrible person." There are people who hold genuinely terrible views who can create works that aren't as terrible, because they don't involve the thing(s) that author is terrible about. There are people with socially progressive views who create things that aren't in accord with that view. The Steven Universe crew had an idea for a Gem that had racist overtones and although it never showed up on the screen (because the idea didn't make it past the process), it popped up in a book as a discarded idea. When called on it, they owned the mistake, apologized, and then set a second printing that didn't have that image in it. Constructive criticism in the abstract, even if not all of the specifics of the criticisms that might have been leveled.
It could have been uglier, and a lot of the time, if it's someone punching down, it ends up being that way. Harshing on someone's squee is a big no-no. And if it turns out that your comment scared away someone from doing something that were going to enjoy and could have found a good community from, well, friend, if you believe in hell, The Bad Place, or your karma messing with your reincarnations, it's not going to turn out well for you. One of those things I've learned about the transformative works community is that, in general, they tend to bring large, pointy objects to the party if someone starts setting themselves up as the sole arbiter of taste or decides they want to gatekeep "their" fandoms. And/or go "look at that person out there, trying to be Ozymandias. We'll leave them a nice wide berth and go have fun over here."
(There are three True Ozy so far. One by Shelley, one by Moore, and the most important, the furry one by Simpson.)
Feedback is still good. But if all you've got for feedback is the stuff you didn't like about the work, it might be better to sit on it or post in your own space. Because the sandwich suggestion of having two good things to say about it for each one that's not is still a good idea. And if you read something and can't come up with those, it's probably better to just be a hit on the counter.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a few days left.]A lot of fanworks comments that you'll see have a fairly positive aspect to them, highlighting the things that the commenter liked about the work, possibly quoting back some of the lines they liked the most or concepts and ideas they really enjoyed about the work. Yet, as we all know, there are also plenty of people who review works on places like Goodreads or the local newspaper columns that do not have nearly as nice a thing to say about some of the works they come across. I mentioned a few works that I was less fond of in yesterday's post. Someone looking at fanworks might come to the conclusion that we're all Polyannas who only like whatever it is we're reading and we don't talk about the ones we don't like.
To some degree, that's absolutely true. "Don't like? Don't read." is a thing in fannish circles, and that credo is helped significantly by the use of robust amounts of tagging, so that someone has a really good idea of what they're getting into before they even start with a work. No tag system is ever complete enough to totally warn someone away from a work they won't like, and sometimes there are works that are completely correctly tagged and there's no reason for a person to think they're not going to get something very much up their alley, and yet, sometimes a work fizzles. Maybe their three points of characterization don't match yours, maybe they've put the characters into a situation that you can't imagine actually happening, even by fandom logic. Maybe they've done something to one of the characters that defies canon, logic, and everything else and it throws you out of the story completely and you don't want to go back in. It happens.
And when it happens, someone we call it a learning moment about what we actually prefer in our works and go on from there, because there's still a lot more works to peruse and there's no sense in getting angry at one in a collection. Sometimes we post about it in our own space and we talk about what didn't work for us and we suggest that perhaps that's not a work that the people who have the same tastes that we do should examine. That's normal. This is fine.
But wait! The author of this particular work has indicated that they would like constructive criticism (or concrit) from people who are reading it. That's a free license to tell them all about the things we didn't like about their work and make dema--suggestions on how they could improve it to better suit our tastes as readers, right?
Not so much, no. Because there's an adjective modifying the word criticism, and as much as people think letting all their gripes out on an author is constructive, there's a lot more to it than that. The point of concrit is for someone to come away with more knowledge and technique that they can apply to improve their writing and its associated skills. For, say, someone writing a drabble, the skills might be figuring out how to make their prose more dense while lightening the number of necessary words to achieve the effect. For someone writing a sprawling epic, it might be advice on how to fold their worldbuilding into the narrative more, so that they're not taking chapter-long breaks so that an epic poem tangentially related to the story getting told can get included in the novel. And for a lot of people, it might be a suggestion or two on how to make their sex scenes sing better. (Mostly because writing descriptive sex scenes is fucking hard, as Sailor Jim will attest. (That piece is reproduced in other places around the Interwebs, if the color scheme doesn't work for you.)
More often than not, concrit is the sort of thing that you need specific space rules for to avoid it devolving into less constructive things, and because occasionally you need, as an author, to be able to accept the criticism as trying to make the work better, rather than as some sort of character attack on you or confirmation that your skills aren't actually any good and you should give up now. Our creations are personal, to greater and lesser degrees, and it's very easy to take "this work has issues" to mean "you are a terrible person." There are people who hold genuinely terrible views who can create works that aren't as terrible, because they don't involve the thing(s) that author is terrible about. There are people with socially progressive views who create things that aren't in accord with that view. The Steven Universe crew had an idea for a Gem that had racist overtones and although it never showed up on the screen (because the idea didn't make it past the process), it popped up in a book as a discarded idea. When called on it, they owned the mistake, apologized, and then set a second printing that didn't have that image in it. Constructive criticism in the abstract, even if not all of the specifics of the criticisms that might have been leveled.
It could have been uglier, and a lot of the time, if it's someone punching down, it ends up being that way. Harshing on someone's squee is a big no-no. And if it turns out that your comment scared away someone from doing something that were going to enjoy and could have found a good community from, well, friend, if you believe in hell, The Bad Place, or your karma messing with your reincarnations, it's not going to turn out well for you. One of those things I've learned about the transformative works community is that, in general, they tend to bring large, pointy objects to the party if someone starts setting themselves up as the sole arbiter of taste or decides they want to gatekeep "their" fandoms. And/or go "look at that person out there, trying to be Ozymandias. We'll leave them a nice wide berth and go have fun over here."
(There are three True Ozy so far. One by Shelley, one by Moore, and the most important, the furry one by Simpson.)
Feedback is still good. But if all you've got for feedback is the stuff you didn't like about the work, it might be better to sit on it or post in your own space. Because the sandwich suggestion of having two good things to say about it for each one that's not is still a good idea. And if you read something and can't come up with those, it's probably better to just be a hit on the counter.
