stolen...

[fufaraw]

here. minchout picked number 6, thoughts on critique.

Someone famous is quoted as saying 'the unexamined life isn't worth living,' and I feel much the same about writing. The sad and painful truth is, I'm incapable of reading anything without critiqueing as I read. If the story is engaging enough I can overlook the occasional typo, lapse in verb-subject agreement, careless use of prepositions, inconsistent tenses, misuse of homonyms or incorrectly understood words, and a lack of grasp of punctuation. At least until the weight of the accumulation of them topples my suspension of disbelief. But I note each one in passing, and the more there are, the more difficult it is for me to continue. I can't help it, it's what I do.

I believe writing is about communication, and as diverse as our understanding and use of words is--and should be--it seems to sabotage communication to misuse the words we have, or to elide their meanings into something else, something different than our common understanding of them. While I do realize and actually approve the fluidity and development of language, within the structure we're presently given, I think careful thought and precision of use should restrain the urge to write too far outside the established boundaries of known language.

That said, I received happy approval from a poetry teacher for my use of 'island' as a verb--even while he urged the deletion of an entire stanza in order to make the poem less a bloated litany of my feels and more a vessel of communication. And he was right, on both counts.

I crave critique, especially analysis of what works, what doesn't, and why. Tell me what I did wrong, but also tell me why it doesn't work, and give me direction on how to make it better. I mean, it isn't as though I haven't walked it around, picked it up and looked at it from several, if not all, angles, taken it apart and put it back together in several different ways, and sought someone else's opinion--and listened to what they had to say--before I presented it for consumption. I may not always take advice given, there may be a point for writing something the way I've done, but I never want to deliberately obfuscate the emotion I'm writing about, and critique helps call me out on bad execution.

Conversely, I've edited and rewritten the very life out of fiction and poetry, attempting to refine it, until there wasn't a breath of life remaining in its attempted perfection, so, you know. Balance.

Comments

[mariecaecilie.livejournal.com]

Now - the above is exactly why I love reading your fics and your posts. You are precise, careful about grammar and you CRAFT your works and posts both. I am also picky regarding writing- which to this day I fail to understand that of all fanfic it was 50 shades which made it into the bestsellers,,?? I can't bear it when middle-age fics have the protagonists eating potatoes or budgerigars turn up in stories set before 1788- Fanfic has made me slightly more tolerant of grammar- so many of us write with English as our second language- but please .. most computers do have grammar and spell check.
I do find it hard to criticise your work especially because of the craftsmanship you bring to your writing and I look forward to reading more,