How seriously do you take criticism?

I'm not sure if I'm picking you up wrongly, but are you saying you pay no attention to feedback and never have? If so, you might be selling yourself short.

Unless you are writing strictly for yourself —meaning nobody else will see it but you—then you might want to pay attention to what people say about your work. After all, you may be the best judge of what you want to say, but you are NOT the best judge of whether you've communicated it to other people.

Of course if people argue against your topic itself, that's a different matter. You're right to hold your ground. If you are poking the hornet's nest, fair enough. But if somebody reacts to your work by giving a few constructive suggestions on how you could improve the way you're communicating your topic, I'd say ...maybe pay attention? It's a bit daft to think you know it all and nothing you write can ever be improved.

I have learned a lot about my own writing by paying attention to people's reactions to it. Sometimes I thought I was being very clever, only to discover that folks were missing my point. Or I thought I'd made a transition clear, but turns out everybody was confused by it. Until people react to your writing, you won't know if you've made your point or not.

 

Actually, that's one observation I never dismiss. If somebody misses an important piece of information in my story, I always go back and try to strengthen it. (And yes, it's happened a lot.)

Just because you have put the tidbit in there doesn't mean it's going to have an impact. If it's a tidbit that needs to be a) noticed and b) remembered, then do what you can to strengthen it. Even one extra sentence can do the trick. Or conjure up a stronger image to fix it in the reader's mind, or make a more explicit connection. Do something—so when the issue comes up again later in the story, the reader will go ...oh, wow, so THAT's what this is all about.

Of course some readers do skim. See if you can discover if that was the case with your reader. And if they admit to skimming, perhaps you need to make that part of your story more interesting, so they don't?

Of course the reader isn't always right. Sometimes they skim or read too quickly, or get tired and stop paying attention. But if you dismiss what they tell you, you're losing what makes a beta reader valuable. They're telling you what they 'got' from your story. If they missed an important link, you probably need to make sure it won't get missed again.

 

You are under the impression I am getting constructive criticism. 8 / 10 even 9 / 10 "reviews" consist of saying I am a moron, idiot, bitch, etc. They aren't nice little reviews - they are meant to hurt; just as if you poked a hornet's nest for real... you get stung. It's a reason why not many authors poke a hornet's nest because they don't like getting stung.

With this comment - improve the way you're communicating your topic - I don't think you really grasp what I mean by hornet's nest. I am not talking about writing rudely to get a reaction or some other nonsense.

I am talking about stuff people don't want to talk about, don't want to read about, don't want to know. The stuff the average writer is too afraid to write about and would rather slap a coat of whitewash over things.

My latest book is 5 years in the making, interviews 1,600 people, and when done will quite literally tilt the concept of the main culprit of predation in North America & typical "predator control" methods upside down. It'll make hunters & farmers - and even government - look like idiots. I'm looking forward to it.



As for constructive criticism yes I listen to it. That's how I took my first non-fiction, a rather bland book on betta fish, and used the knowledge gleaned there into writing a somewhat unorthodox dog book that fetched a rather pretty penny in both English and one of the languages I speak.

 

Oh, fair enough. I did pick you up wrongly. Of course you should never pay attention to people who call you a moron, idiot, bitch or any other names. It just wasn't clear from your post that you were talking about name-calling and not feedback. What they said to you isn't criticism, it's a direct attack. You're quite right to ignore it.

It sounded to me, when you said "I really don't take criticism seriously actually. Never have, even when I started writing," that you were referring to critiques.

Amazon's 'review' section could use a revamp, couldn't it? They allow far too much of this sort of 'review' to get past them. With the huge amount of money they make, surely they could employ people to weed through the reviews and remove any that take that sort of tone. Good online websites monitor for trolls, and I think it's about time Amazon does the same. They do have the 'verified purchase' notation, which helps. At least a potential reader knows who has actually bought your book, before giving the 'review.' So that's a start.

By the way, your book sounds interesting, and it looks as if you've done a lot of work on it. I hope it stirs up the right kind of hornet's nest!

 

I apologize. English for all my mastery of it, isn't my 1st language. I speak German & French long before I speak English. I have miscommunication problems at times as I'm typically off by a few words with whatever I am trying to say in English so the message isn't conveyed quite right. Doesn't help when amongst family [and most friends] I rarely have to speak English - it's not needed.

I do take criticism when it has meaning, let's put it this way. I mean I had a college classmate with my first book - the betta one - sign on, introduce himself as So&So and that we actually went to the same school... very nice intro, complimented me as a person, and then commenced to point out every little error with surgical precision. I couldn't stop laughing. I remember that so well cause I messaged him on FB the next day and asked why he just didn't email me this ranting review.


But sometimes one has to remember even the best meaning criticism is meaningless. The reader may want the book to read one way - which will speed the book up too much or slow it down if redone that specific way. Or a correction of the style of writing might take away "weight" of the story - I wrote a poem [the Pain here on the poetry section of this forum] on another forum where the person told me to revise some of the words away from an older most abstract way of writing to modern proper grammar. Yes from a grammatical standpoint theirs is better, from a reading standpoint their corrections make the poem clunky and takes away from the early 1800s setting of the poem [like people cared about grammar on the western frontier].

I see reviews & criticism as a guideline and just that. Particularly when if you think about it, how many reviewers are experienced writers. Or experienced readers. I mean what sort of a review is "It was good. Or I really got it." Stuff like that is just someone gabbing because they can and they probably understood two lines yet alone the whole book.

Look at it this way - and this is what I don't doubt experienced writers do - though someone may think your writing style crap because of the fact you use big words and the storyline is long "boring" this is not actually because your writing style is crap & the storyline boring... this is due to the simple fact that the reviewer's writing style is barely above high school level and the hardest book they read was Dr. Seuss. So to them it's crappy & boring.

 

I think it all boils down to the author being honest with him/herself in deciding whether the criticism makes sense. Sometimes it makes sense, even when it definitely is NOT what you want to hear. But unless you're the kind of person who finds it easy to live with stuff that's not right, it will come back to haunt you if you ignore good advice.

 

I take criticism with a grain of salt. How am I to know if the reviewer is some literature genius with a Masters in English, or some goofball who is lucky if they know what promiscuous means.

Typically if it is a reviewer on let's say Amazon or something similar, I review the reviewer to see if there is any merit to their claims. I worked with a friend to write a little ditty novella at the end of high school - just a dorky little thing, younger YA's - and we got some reviews. A few of them caught my eye because they really didn't go with the story. Reviewing the reviewers turned out that they were making similarly negative reviews on all sorts of products [so it was just someone going around being an arse].

 

I claim to shrug it off, but in truth, it will hunt me until my death. But constructive criticism, which I can actually learn from, is golden.

 

I think maybe I need to reread this thread a few times and digest what it's saying.

I'm on my fourth or fifth beta reader for my first novel. Up to now, all of them, even the one who for various reasons chose not to read much of it, have given me feedback on problems I could recognise and correct. One said my male MC was a bit of an enigma. Another said my ending went on too long. Another said my first chapter read like something out of a YA novel. Yet another questioned something my female MC did, asking wouldn't that go against her personal standards? In all those cases I could look at the story and say, "Ya know, you're right. Time to rethink that." But the current beta . . . she's only a little over a quarter of the way through the manuscript and already her feedback has me depressed as hell.

On the one hand, she's told me she finds it hard to put down, and she loves my lead characters. But once in every five or six chapters it seems I've managed to use a word that's not in her vocabulary (am I the only one who knows what "moribund" means?), or I've had a character make a passing reference to a cultural icon popular in the time the book is set (the early 1980s). In neither case is it life or death that the reader be familiar with the word or the celebrity. But she tells me these things make her feel stupid and, ergo, it will make all my potential readers feel stupid. In her latest critique installment she went further, saying it was my whole style that needs to be dumbed down; at least, if my main characters are bright, witty people (I didn't realize they engaged in all that much brilliant repartee, but oh, well), everyone else should sound like the type who partied their way through high school.

What the dickens am I supposed to do with that? Yeah, in some cases I've been able to look at the offending word and realize it doesn't communicate what I need it to, after all, and change it out. But other times . . . I mean, damn! Now I'm stressing out over whether she might be right, that I have no audience at all (well, other than the two middle-aged guys and the one 16-year-old girl who read it and loved it before). I don't want simply to ignore her input, but . . .

As I said, I probably need to go back and reread this thread.

 

She's telling you to dumb the whole thing down so people like her will understand it? Ah...no. She's not your target audience, is she?

Now you know not to market the book to somebody who is ...um ...stupid. They won't get it. Maybe put a warning on the back cover. "If you are thick as a plank, don't bother reading this book. You won't like my word choices because you'll need to go to the dictionary to understand them. And you probably don't own a dictionary, so you'll need to go out and buy one, and that's just so so UNFAIR. Move along, people. Nothing to see here."

 

Not my target audience? I guess not, which disappoints me.

*Sigh* She's a fellow author, and I'm beta-reading her latest as she does mine. I'm praying I'll stay objective about hers and keep any feelings about her reactions to my work out of my critique.

 

It really does help to tell yourself she's not your target audience. Her objections are not based on any mistakes you've made, they're based on her preferences. Thats a good indication. Discovery of who your target audience actually is is one of the great benefits of getting lot of betas to read your work. The results are often surprising. I had people whom I thought would really like my novel actually not get into it at all. And some people whom I hesitated to give it to—because I was so sure they'd dislike it on sight—actually were some of my more enthusiastic readers.

One of my oldest friends was somebody I avoided like the plague because I was sure he'd be disappointed in me ...that he wouldn't like the tone OR the subject matter at all. That he'd be polite, but probably wouldn't finish it. He's somebody who normally reads political non-fiction and stuff like that, and has two Masters degrees and one Doctorial degree, all in either political or scientific fields. But he persisted, so I gave it to him at long last.

Not only did he gallop through it in a week (it's 210,000 words long!), but he skipped his work on the last day so he could finish it. He said parts of it made him cry because it made him remember how certain kinds of things made him feel, back when they were happening to him. And he also gave me some incredibly good suggestions about how to improve the flow in spots, which I instantly implemented because they made perfect sense. So there you go. And he's one of the people who is now pushing me hard to get it published.

If I've learned anything in this game it's don't assume anything about your betas beforehand. They will surprise you. Nicely and otherwise.

 

Point taken about target audience. But still . . . heaven help me, this evening in my email I picked up this:

"I just think that all of your characters talk alike - and I would think they'd have different speech patterns. Very few people have vocabularies that good or are that clever with their quips."
​

They all talk alike? Hell, I'd been priding myself on how each of my character's speech was distinctive! And everybody is littering up the page with clever quips? Crap, what if she's right?

(I was hoping to publish this novel by Christmas, but maybe I need a couple-three more betas.)

 

Okay, did she offer any examples? Or any way to tackle this 'problem?' If not, I'd just ignore it. It sounds to me as if she's really hung up on your vocabulary, and unless you lower the tone of that, she won't be pleased. Did any other betas mention this? However ...I would certainly advocate as many betas as possible. You really won't lose by waiting a bit longer for publication if you have doubts.

 

Examples? Well, yes, in a way. She is really into the Myers-Briggs personality types and has already slotted my MCs into a couple of types the M-B system says are rare in the population. She suggested I go on YouTube and find videos of the other, more common, M-B types talking, and copy their speech patterns. How seriously do I take criticism? Seriously enough that I tried it. But I can't find any videos by researchers based on, "Listen! This is how S-Js talk!" It's all clips by individuals saying, "Hi, I'm an ESFJ and this is how I see life." I watched a few of these, and the vocab, phrasing, sentence structure, etc., of the different M-B types seemed pretty much alike; the real difference was in body language, tone of voice, enthusiasm vs cool serenity, that kind of thing. And of course, people don't address a YouTube audience the same way they would talk with their friends in everyday conversation.

As to the vocab problem, nope, other than flagging three or four words out of about 25,000, no. My characters and their individual dialogue styles haven't changed since the last excerpt I posted on the Workshop, and I don't remember anyone here saying they all sounded alike . . .

Maybe I should go back and look. Memory is selective.

But yes, more betas. Especially now that I believe I have all the plot holes filled.

Thanks.

 

I'd say if you have a very clear picture in your head of what your characters are like, and you definitely see them as individuals, not just a chance to write quips, you probably have nothing to worry about. If your characters are speaking the way you envision them speaking, that means you're writing true to what you 'see.'

The only time I would worry is if you're allowing your desire to write witty dialogue to dominate the personalities of your characters. A character should speak true to him/herself. If your characters are all intellectuals, they will speak that way. If one of them is an intellectual and the other is barely literate, I would NOT allow them to speak the same way, or exchange word quips at the same level. As long as that's not what you're doing, I wouldn't worry too much. The fact that nobody else who has critiqued your work has noted this 'problem' it probably means you're okay. It's been a while since I read your workshop entries, but I don't remember that issue bothering me at all. For what that's worth.

 

I always prefer constructive criticism.
I knew a lady that told me I was best at writing about myself, and that put me off of writing short stories for a while.. I just felt like there was something wrong with me, not with my writing, based on the way she worded her criticism..

After a while, though, I realized I just needed to learn how to write a certain kind of thing.
If I'm journalling, well, I've already got that downpat.. but it just so happens that I'm going to have to work a little harder to do the other genres and stuff. Lol.

So yeah, just saying something bad about what I wrote didn't help me very much. I always prefer to know exactly where I went wrong.
In this case, it was mostly structural.

 

It depends on the type of criticism and who's giving it to me.
I once received something like, "It's too serious and there's no romantic connection between the two main characters."
However, I was not writing a romance so there should have been no romantic connection and it was supposed to be a very serious detective story, so I sort of ignored that persons comments because it was clear to me that all they were expecting it to be something which I'd never intended it to be.
However, if there was constructive criticism, I'd take it very seriously and try my best to make my story as entertaining as possible.

 

I do take critique seriously. Even if the critique in question is negative, I get a good feeling in me. I see it as someone taking the time and energy to give ways on how I can improve my work. Now if a negative review just slams my writing, calls it a piece of crap, and doesn't explain how I can improve, then I'll ignore it. But the critique I pay attention to is the kind that tells me what's wrong, why it's wrong, and how to fix it. The what, why, and how. Simple as that.

 

Not reading critiques has to be the hardest thing for any artist to accomplish... but it's the best approach.

 

One hit me hard and that was my cousin.

I sent a chapter I had just finished and revised two times. She said she reads it tonight and after few days I asked for feedback. She never answered and has been avoiding me ever since. Guess it sucked big time.

 

Do you mean critiques or reviews? Why would you want to ignore critiques?

I had the same thing, but the person in my case was just busy. She got back to me eventually, and she didn't hate it.

 

I'd take the criticism with a grain of salt.
Because IMOHO it's actually the worst kind of advice - find a label for your character and work to uphold it? Could just be me though. It's not that I'm against characters exhibiting classic personality traits, its when people start using them as an inflexible formula.

Also I scored INFP - one of the rarest personalities - but on that list is a pretty bizarre mix of people - Adolph Hitler, Marilyn Manson, Billy Crystal, Carrie Fisher, Fred Macmurray, Gillian Anderson, Jesus, Plato, Prince, Gandhi, Carl Jung. Looking at that list can anyone really define how an INFP would talk when they come in so many different types?

I would think it would be easier to focus on the characters background, their reactions, and opinions - and a natural type will emerge anyway. If she's picking them out of your story then you're already achieved it unconsciously.
And for me the subconscious writer inside always kicks my conscious writer's butt every time.

 

How seriously do I take criticism? It depends who it's from and how much I get.

Criticism only transmutes from an opinion to a problem when a correlation is formed. If a lot of people are pointing out one specific feature of your story or prose then chances are it's flawed.

You should attain criticism from the every day reader who doesn't give a fuck about writing. Someone who picks up a book and reads for sheer entertainment. This is your market -- the real market. Whether you're aiming to be published, or handing your story out for free, those kinds of people make up the majority of your reader base. Avoid academics and elitists because they'll only bitch and cry about intricate details, and compare your sweat and tears to the likes of Dickens and Steinbeck, whose qualities you don't have to attain to become a respectable writer.

Use criticism (which is a word I actually hate; I much prefer "feedback") sparingly, especially if it comes from this forum.

On an end note: those who want to expand their understanding of the craft, I highly recommend On Writing by Stephen King. It's very good. Though, I'm not sure I agree with his views on the passive voice.