Getting Critiques: How do you select what you use and what you ignore?

[Linda Adams]

I thought this would make a good topic for discussion. I’m always seeing writers who look like they try to use everyone’s comments and then run into trouble when the comments conflict.

How do you pick which comments you use and which ones you don’t?

[Giddy]

I think the first lesson we need to learn is to trust ourselves. Once we can do that we can see the critique as simply someone elses idea/opinion rather than gospel and can treat it as that.

Then, we can take what makes sense to us and discount the rest.

Changing your story to suit every critiquer is a mistake and can ruin that story in a nano second.

Sadly, I’ve been there. But I learn’t and can now comfortably ignore things that don’t read true to me or the work being critiqued.

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You also need to keep in mind that the person critiqueing is often an unknown. Do they know what they are talking about? Are they there to truly help you or just to be trouble? Do they read your genre and understand it? Sometimes they just won’t like your style -that’s ok, not eveyone will- There are many I have had critiques from in the past that rave on about a certain point. When I went and checked them out I saw that they had recently been critiqued and were only echoing what had just be told to them about their own writing.

Writer beware.

I have also had many insightful critiques that made perfect sense and helped the story greatly.

Again, finding the truth comes back to trusting yourself.

[jhmcmullen]

Hmm. Let’s try to construct my algorithm for deciding on comments.

First, do I know the reviewer? Someone about whom I know nothing gets different filters from someone I know and trust or someone I know and distrust. So a comment from someone I know and trust is more likely to be acted on that one from someone I don’t know and definitely more likely than one from someone I distrust.

Second, do they get what I’m trying to do? I might not even be clear on it, so this one’s iffy, but if I write a heart-warming fable and they approach it as if it were a noir murder mystery, I see bad things ahead. Sometimes at this stage, I realize that I’ve been trying (incidentally) to do something terribly sexist, and the comment makes me rethink the story.

Third, can I see what they mean? If I can’t interpret the comment, I can’t even try to implement the change, except accidentally.

Fourth, do I agree with it, or at least can I see where it’s coming from? The cause of the statement might be that I have failed to pull something off, so it looks like one type of story instead of another.

Fifth, am I capable of it? Fine suggestions are given where I am not yet capable of pulling off the effect. I might try in the rewriting stage and then decide I can’t make it work (or get someone else’s opinion).

So if I get two conflicting comments, preference goes to the person I know and trust, to the person who gets what I’m trying to do or opens my eyes, to the person who explains herself or himself, to the person who’s cogent about the comment. I might well try something difficult, but fall back on something I can achieve.

John

Great at theory, terrible at practice.

[JuneDrexler]

I think any method you use strictly will get you in trouble. You need to be flexible. You need to evaluate based on several criteria rather than just one. That said, there are a few things I use.

First, as others have said, think about who the critiquer is. Are they interested in the genre you are writing, or are they unfamiliar with it. Further, what is their ‘skill level’ — this isn’t a perfect criteria because there are professionals who are not very good at critiquing and rank beginners that have a real talent for it. But,that said, I will often give more weight to someone with a lot of success in the genre I’m writing over someone who has never finished a story.

Second, think about how the critique ‘inspires’ you. Negative comments will always make you feel bad on some level. But, after this initial ‘oh no’, a good critiques will usually inspire you. The good critique makes you think ‘oh, wow, that makes so much sense’ while the one you should reject makes you feel like you want to abandon the story.

Finally, I think you can look at percentages. If only one critiquer has a complaint while 10 others say ‘not a problem’ it’s possible that one critiquer is just presenting a personal quirk.

–June

[Linda Adams]

I usually take notes of anything that catches my attention. Then I ignore all my notes and fix the story in whatever way I need to. A lot of times I find that the critiquer identified a problem, but not necessarily the problem they named. So it’s a lot easier for me to take my impressions from the comments and think about it for a while.

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