Thoughts on Writing #12: Good Critique, Bad Critique

[Robert_Moriyama]

...it may be sacrilege, but I don't feel that editors walk on water. I believe that they CAN be wrong on occasion, that they CAN let their personal preferences shade their views, just like the rest of us. And some may plain dislike your style, while putting an editorial sheen on that dislike to make it look like literary criticism.

I try to mention that fact -- that tastes vary a lot, and that a stylistic quirk that bugs me might make another editor plotz (as in "an egg salad recipe so good, it could make you plotz", the McGuffin in Woody Allen's redubbed Japanese spy movie, "What's Up Tiger Lily?") from sheer joy. On the other hand, I also try to give what I consider to be generally valid advice (e.g., first-person present tense is very hard to do well -- especially if the narrator dies!). And if the grammar and sentence structure make my head hurt, I can be pretty harsh.

But some of my victims keep returning to the torture chamber, so I guess I'm not quite bad enough to merit assassination.

(Yikes! What are the odds that a molotov cocktail would fly through my window at that very moment? Now, I'd have to say that a coincidence like that probably takes the reader right out of the story (it's hard to stay immersed in another world while snorting hard enough to make snot come out of your ears), and reject this whole post...)

[kailhofer]

While I respect all that Ms. McGuire has offered in this series, I have to say I was not reached by this month's installment.

I thought it gave good examples of "owning" language (I have this problem, I didn't like, etc.) and did an excellent job of providing phrases one would use while being diplomatic. However, to me, I thought it lacked focus, something that seemed to be indicated by the "being" paragraph at the beginning. It didn't seem to me to be so much about how to do a great critique or avoid doing a bad one as how to recognize one or what voice to use to be diplomatic while making a critique.

The essay, as I read it, skipped entirely over what to actually critique in a story, which may in the end be more important to the story's author than the language used in doing it. I personally don't get hung up on diplomatic language or how well intentioned a review is. As an author, if it's my story being reviewed, I want the reviewer to get to the meat of the story in question and let me know what worked or what didn't. To that end, I would have rather seen a discussion on which parts of writing are most beneficial to authors to be reviewed in a critique, and how to analyze things like mechanics, setting, character development, plot development and dialog usage, or perhaps some other part of a story.

Now, how to do a good critique is a difficult topic, one that might take months of articles, and I would certainly grant that. After all, just because one can write doesn't mean one can critique well. Perhaps there are more essays in this series that provide something along the lines I'm looking for.

In case that's not to be, I've read a lot about how to critique from many sites, such as Critters and the Online Writing Workshop, so in addition to Ms. McGuire's advice, I would offer links that I've felt were helpful to me in learning how to critique.

How to be diplomatic in critiques:
http://www.critters.org/diplomacy.html

how to critique stories:
http://www.crayne.com/howcrit.html
http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/ho ... .shtml#1.4

This last one is my favorite. I keep a printout of 1.4.1 - 1.4.5 next to my computer to reference whenever I do a full-on critique of a story as a checklist of sorts to gauge a story against.

So, no disrespect to Ms. McGuire and the good I think she's done with her series so far, but I felt that this particular essay fell short of it's potential.

Nate