Reality Check Harsh criticism - how do you take it?
- Thread starter Tim James
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I know. I was talking about the gist of all the responses (my inference, which may be wrong). Looking back, I realise I was vague. I meant the whole thread, not your OP.
Never heard that before, but it's on the same track as Stephen King's famous million words, which dates back, probably, to the excellent but slightly problematic John D MacDonald.
(It's also been credited to David Eddings, Jerry Pournelle, Ray Bradbury, and Elmore Leonard.)
Erica Verrillo
Basic
- May 27, 2016
I worked with a very exacting editor at Random House for three years. She had lots of things to say about my manuscripts; there wasn't a page that wasn't marked up with suggestions, corrections, deletions. Now, an editor is not the same as an overall critique, but editing bears remarkable similarity in substance. In the end, you must evaluate the comments, and make a decision as to whether they are correct. Sometimes, those comments are dead wrong. Other times, they are right. You are the writer, so it is up to you to develop enough judgment and enough distance from your writing to make the proper call.
Robinne Weiss
Full Member
- May 19, 2015
Yep, I'm sure all of us have a bin full of crap writing that we've ditched. I don't even think about those things, but there are reams and reams of them! Good to recognise when something is valuable only to line the parakeet's cage.
Ah. Don't back down from a challenge. To get all MFA on you, how does it make you feel? [Mostly kidding]
I think rhythm is underestimated. Without having read the novel, I'd say the character whose POV we're in has a lot of contempt for everything around him. It's a bleak POV.
I think you might have been trying to say that the consensus is that most of us would do D ... not that it was right to do D... necessarily ...
Very often I will set off on a long walk with the germ of an idea for a scene and by the time I return (two or so hours later) I will have the whole scene mapped out in my mind complete with "practiced" dialogue.
Quite what anyone watching me thinks of me muttering to myself as I walk along, I have no idea.
Schizophrenia might be what they're thinking. Do you have a tin foil hat?
- Aug 17, 2014
I think we owe each other honesty, and we should be grateful for it.
Having said that, not hard to spot a hatchet job. The ones which worry us aren't the nasty ones, they are the ones where the remarks chime with wit what we suspect is true.
For me the valuable feedback is about how the reader responds to the tale, emotionally, intellectually but most importantly when and why they want to stop reading. The frisbee moment or the put the book down and maybe get back to it later moment.
Sometimes they tell you what you need to do to put it right, or how they would have approached it - that can be interesting or helpful, but really they are your problems to solve. All the reader can tell you is what grabs them, and what doesn't.
Having said that, not hard to spot a hatchet job. The ones which worry us aren't the nasty ones, they are the ones where the remarks chime with wit what we suspect is true.
For me the valuable feedback is about how the reader responds to the tale, emotionally, intellectually but most importantly when and why they want to stop reading. The frisbee moment or the put the book down and maybe get back to it later moment.
Sometimes they tell you what you need to do to put it right, or how they would have approached it - that can be interesting or helpful, but really they are your problems to solve. All the reader can tell you is what grabs them, and what doesn't.
Rachel Caldecott
Basic
- Nov 13, 2017
I'm a D girl!
I think you might be right.
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