Musing: general - Concrit

[wilderthan]

I'm notoriously bad at getting concrit, and I'm not much better at giving it. I don't like to hurt people's feelings, and I don't trust my own opinions. When I do give concrit, I tend to point out any spelling/grammar errors and typos, and to pick out a few phrases that I really liked, or a little element that I loved.

In future, if there's any element that didn't do anything for me, I might try and mention that too.

But I was thinking about concrit, and me, and the way that my English teachers could give me back a story absolutely covered in red pen, and I would grin and I would edit. Sometimes I didn't agree with what they said, but I'd look at their suggestions and rework what I'd written a little -- not so that it became more their story than mine, but so that what I wanted to happen became more believable for them.

On the other hand, someone left me a comment picking on the structure of the piece, the characterisation, etc, and I hated it, because they were stating as facts that these things didn't work for them so they didn't work for anybody.

I was thinking about the different critical approaches I learnt for English Lit., and I thought of one I think is really appropriate when it comes to fanfiction: reader response. We may not all be English teachers, or particularly literate, or even native speakers, but we have our own responses to something. Often, that leads to someone saying "[plot point] is wrong because [character] wouldn't do that". Sometimes it's obvious that that's just their opinion, sometimes it comes off as "hey, everyone who reads this thinks you suck!".

I think that the easiest way to review and dodge offending anybody, save the least willing to listen, is to pick out the thing that forced you out of the story and say "[plot point] doesn't feel right to me because the impression I got of [character] in canon is [x] because of [canon plot point]". Or perhaps "I'm not sure why, but [plot point] doesn't feel right to me, perhaps you could tweak it so that [x] instead" -- that kind of thing. It sounds like a lot of pussyfooting around, but I think that I at least would take concrit like that a lot easier. Obviously, grammar, spelling and such aren't subjective, but for anything that's a matter of preference, it's probably best to make sure it's obvious that you're entering the world of opinion -- to think of it not as "concrit" but as "reader response".

Of course, there are some people who don't do that and leave brilliant responses that help the authors. There are authors who won't take even that and will stir up a shitstorm about it, and "opinions" are often more volatile than cold hard facts -- but opinions disguised as "cold hard facts" are worse.

Comments

[bottle-of-shine.livejournal.com]

Is it fair to say that I think so many people might be bad at critical feedback in fandom because interpretation is just so subjective? I mean, original work, people have to take just the work, with anything derivative just by writing you're invoking a reader's memory and emotions about a source that you're interpreting just like they did. And sometimes people don't see "this didn't scan for ME", they just see, "Your interpretation is wrong."

Admittedly, some people are bad at making it so it's subjective, but I'm starting to think the fault is just with totally subjective things like canon. What is canon, anyway. Because the answer is different for everyone, I think there's a difference.

I like your solution, though, I might steal that. I guess for me it ends up being harder because most of the things that ping me out of stories have to do with bad fanon, which you can't convince people is bad if they think it's good, and flow, which is actually the number one thing that makes characterization not work for me! Which is retarded, I guess.

Fandom is a dangerous place, you could say!

[wilderthan.livejournal.com]

I think that's fair to say, yeah. That's another thing about the whole taking it out of the teacher-student environment I didn't actually think of -- the stuff I present to them is obviously original and even if it was fanfic they wouldn't know the characters (unless it was one of them and Firefly, but that's because I bought him the boxset). I mean, fans vary wildly as to whether they even agree on something as simple as, I don't know, the eye colour of a certain character. Which adds more difficulty to concrit in a fandom situation, like you say, because people think there's room for your interpretation is wrong.

And that's true, too. Like, some people probably think it's canon that Nooj actually loves Leblanc, while others definitely think um, no, not really. Just to think of a random example.

I dunno, if you can say "this is just me, but...", then I think that covers your ass. I mean, some people love original work for reasons that make no sense to me, and I hate said work for reasons that make no sense to them. (Not Harry Potter. I have many reasons for that. But other things.) People need to realise that one person's opinion =/= all people's opinion, and if you say "it might be just me, but..." then you'd've done your part to making sure that's clear, y'know?

(That's... general you, mostly in that last paragraph. And just one way to go about it. I'm sure there are others.)