In which I make some attempt to actually be brief and cogent about reviews and critique and concrit

... instead of my usual mad ramblings and digressions.

I can't quite bring myself to bullet points, but I shall at least try to avoid my usual trick of paragraphs styled after the Amazon Jungle.

1) Most important:

I write about these things because I like to sort out what I think and find out what other people think.

I'm interested in the process itself, as one of the evolving processes of the online fannish creative community and therefore consider it a reasonable topic for meta.

I don't always make this sufficiently clear, I suspect. Some sort of actual policy statement seems in order:

I have no desire whatsoever to actually dictate how people should or should not respond to fiction, mine or anyone's.

My line for actually becoming annoyed with responses to fiction is actual personal abuse. Anything short of that and nobody ever needs to worry about so much as a harsh word from me.

(If you ever chance to catch me off-guard with a comment about something I'm feeling especially uncertain or fragile about, I may snark at you. My track record for realizing what I've done and apologising is, I think, pretty good, though.)

2) One of the things I'd truly like to see better addressed is the often-heard and quite reasonable complaint that everyone says they want concrit, but half of them don't mean it, and people get snarked at.

Totally fair. This is one reason I try to be really upfront about how I feel about the whole process -- if it's not reasonable of me to try to prevent responses I won't like, it's downright stupid and unfair to actively solicit responses I don't want.

I don't like setting people up. It's silly and unkind.

3) I've seen a lot of comments that suggest that people are afraid to ask for limits on the kinds of crit they get -- that people will automatically assume that they're trying to ensure only positive responses, or whatever, and they will get flamed.

Responses to my ramblings suggest that this is not so; some people don't agree with me at all, not a lot of people agree with me completely, but I haven't been flamed yet for talking about what I find helpful and not helpful, among the subset of "critique which is actually intended to be of use to the writer."

So in fact it seems that to understand what kinds of responses are and are not helpful to you as a writer and to say so is not so scary as it might seem.

You know, I suspected this. People who are interested in helping other writers are, in fact, a pretty nice bunch, and like to know what actually helps.

4) I conclude, on the evidence thus far, that I am a bit of an outlier: most people are both less well-equipped with betas/co-writers and much better-equipped to profit from advice that arrives instead of being sought-out than I am.

5) The rapidly-evolving terminology is problematic for a lot of people.

There are "reviews", "critiques", and "concrit", and the lines between them aren't understood the same ways by everyone.

This makes discussing the matter tricky, as it's easy to give the impression that you're applying to reviews and critiques statements you only mean to apply to concrit, and the impression that gives tends to be unfortunate in the extreme.

6) If I have managed to draw any remotely generalizable conclusions from all this rambling, they are this:

For writers: When asking for concrit or no concrit, it's good to be specific, and being specific will not generally cause people to throw rocks at you.

Don't ask for it just because you think it's polite or required; that just wastes people's time, gets you all crabby, and confuses the issue.

For concrit people: the whole process seems to go better if you give the writer a chance to let you know if -- and when -- they'd like the concrit; not only does this give them more of a sense of equality in the transaction, it saves you wasting your valuable time if they would for whatever reason (including having already decided that they don't like that piece very much, for all the reasons you're about to itemise, say), prefer not.

(Also, I suspect the first 72 hours may be a bad time for a lot of people. Writers shouldn't be fragile little flowers about these things, it's true, but some degree of wibbling just after posting seems to be very common. Probably best to let them collect a few bouquets and catch their breath, first.)

And, finally,

7) The people who read this lj are incredibly patient with my ramblings and half-formed crackpot theories. I appreciate it no end.

So, that's what I think at the moment. What do you think?

Now I need to knock off the meta for awhile and get back to a) betaing for pewtergryphon, b) running through Winter's Tale for damned_colonial, and c) swearingly blackly at the scattered little fragments of what *I* am trying to write, as they laugh mockingly at me from the screen and do rude little interperative dances.

ETA:

8) You know, I could have saved myself much trouble and many words if I had at any time thought to consider this in light of a Known Quirk of mine, which is: I am chronically incapable of absorbing huge wodges of Theory, unless and until I have a practical example in front of me and have spent a certain amount of time flailing about wrestling with same on my own.

*sigh* Damn, I'm slow sometimes.