Dec

14

Critical

Filed Under Uncategorized | 9 Comments

I’m taking an online class in fiction writing and it’s been nice, an opportunity to learn the basics (third person multiple POV wha? Ohhhh, the thing they did in World War Z, gotcha) and flex some muscles that normally lay dormant unless I’m invited to some sort of group gathering in which case oh BOY do the hastily-invented excuses flow like wine. The class consists of ongoing lectures — wall-of-text-style as opposed to video, or worse, the sort of class that involves Skype, don’t think I didn’t conduct exhaustive research ahead of time on that horrifying possibility — a forum discussion, a weekly writing prompt, and the occasional “booth” assignment where you submit written work for your classmates to critique.

The weekly prompts are mostly fun with the exception of the one where we were supposed to write a fictional dating profile (heaaaaaarnnnnnnnngggggh), but the booth critiques, holy cow. Each week I have three or four pieces to read and comment on, and it is SO hard. It’s like being asked to provide constructive criticism about someone’s child: “Well, he has great hair! Just great. Love the curls. I think it would maybe be nice if he wasn’t quite so, ah, high-spirited — can you get him off my leg? Thanks — but that’s just my personal preference. Overall you’ve done a great job birthing him and I’m eager to see how he develops.”

The idea is to be encouraging but also provide feedback on what could be improved and I just want to do it in a way that is kind and useful and perhaps even so meaningful it propels them to become wildly successful and years from now they post it on some Reddit thread titled “What was the greatest piece of advice anyone ever gave you?” and everyone is like no way was that really So-and-So, Bestselling Author, and they’re like yes it is me I just wanted to share this amazing thing on account of what a positive impact it had on my life. However, I suspect what I really end up writing sounds like “ALLOW ME TO CLUMSILY PRAISE YOUR EFFORTS! SOME WORDS GOOD SOME LESS GOOD.”

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