Writing can be a lonely business.
Critique groups can be great - if they are active.
Critique groups can be hell - if you feel you don’t fit anymore.
That’s kind of what’s happened to me. I feel I don’t fit. I feel I’m writing the wrong thing when everyone goes off in directions I don’t want to go to. I can’t critique some things. I’ve started to dislike Urban Fantasy, because there’s just too much of it and all of it tries to be “Gritty”. Swearing isn’t gritty, it’s offensive to a lot of people. I swear as much as the next person, my characters use “bad words” too, but they aren’t based on those words, they don’t need them to look tough. My hero might utter an expletive when he’s annoyed, as a reaction to something, but my heroine usually doesn’t resort to it. Hell, she might even pull him up on it.
Too many stories I see these days have a heroine which is a tough gal, who gives as good as she gets — and swears like a trooper. Sometimes it works, sometimes Miss Heroine is written very real, very well. Most times… ugh.
I don’t like childish heroines either. Keep your bubblegum pink girly girls whose every other word is fuck. I’m an adult, I like an adult heroine. Swearing doesn’t give character, it makes me dislike the person if it’s overused. And some words… some words should be struck from the english language with a penalty to anyone who uses them. Cee You Next Thursday (I leave it up to you to work out what I mean) used by a woman… is so incredibly offensive to me, it’s not even funny.
Part of my dislike for that word stems from the fact that I work with people who think that word is okay to use to apply to people. They mean to label them an Asshole / Bastard / Idiot — but believe me, I don’t think it’s funny. I’ve taken to throwing soap bits at my boss when he says it, and I’ve already told him it’s *not* okay, it’s actually very offensive. He apologized and is trying to curb his tongue, but he gets carried away, as do the other guys.
So when I found it used in a story… Sorry. It jarred me so badly, I wanted nothing to do with a writer who uses it for effect.
The story was labelled Urban Fantasy, and it was another strike against the entire genre for me, because if that is the direction the genre takes — then it’s not something I’ll read. It will make me boycott the author, period.
Yeah, maybe I’m a prude. I don’t think so, but there you go. I don’t mind graphic scenes, I don’t mind graphic language. I do mind that word. I have a similar dislike of the word cock, but alas… I’m female. It’s nowhere near as offensive to me as the equivalent c word as applied to the female genitalia.
Why, why, do some women feel it’s okay to bring such a degrading word into the generally accepted vocabulary?
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not.
But I digress.
The above is one of the reasons I shied away from a really great critique group. I have a problem with someone in there, and although I’ve been around a long time, that doesn’t matter. So I didn’t go back anymore. I don’t want to post anything there, because I know I’d eventually get confrontational. I don’t want to post my chapters for critique anymore because I don’t want that writer anywhere near them, or even see them.
Yes, I know I’m anal and I cut myself off due to my own misgivings. I miss the rest of the girls. A lot. They are great, but at the end of it, sorry, I just felt cut off and singled out in a way. I can’t help the way I feel, and since no one else shares that feeling, I’m better off out of there I think.
I’m also the only paranormal writer in the mix, the rest write other things. It’s a romance group, so that’s what I expect to critique. Well. First chapters of a new member were Urban Fantasy, so that’s another thing. Why the HELL join a romance group - if that’s not what you write? It boggles the mind.
Yeah, I can critique it. And I did. I got slammed instantly because yeah, I was blunt. It didn’t work for me. When I asked someone else — funny, they said the same thing. Same points I made. But they didn’t post it, I did. Seeing the response I got made them not post their opinion. Therefore I was the evil nasty critiquer who doesn’t “get” it when everyone else does. (No they didn’t like it any more than I did, they were just more polite and kept stumm.)
So now that I don’t mingle there, I feel lost and lonely. I’m holding off on retiring from the group, but I know I will. It will feel like losing a lot of very good friends, but my feelings about hanging on are too strong and would make me too resentful, too… catty. God, how to tell someone you will really miss them, but you can’t stay because you know what it will turn into? That the trust toward someone just isn’t there?
That’s what it boils down to, I think. Trust. You have to trust your critique partners to do right by you, to give you their honest — even if it hurts — opinion. But you have to be able to take it as well as dish it. I can take it, hell, I had one critiquer tell me the heroine didn’t work. At all. And to go and rewrite her.
Guess what? I did. It hurt at the time, but the story is better for it. I valued her opinion, because I knew there was no animosity or anything, the trust was there for her to feel comfortable enough to tell me the truth. I ended up getting slammed for doing the same thing, btw. (Not by the same person.) That — more than anything — destroyed the faith I had in the group as a whole. I won’t present my opinion through rose tinted glasses just in case I might offend the author of the piece. If that’s what they want, then tell me not to critique their stuff. That’s fine by me, but frankly, don’t tell me off after I spend a few days going over some twenty single spaced pages and line edit.
I don’t agree with a bunch of the critiques I get, but I wouldn’t dream telling the critiquer off for their opinion. They didn’t like it, that is THEIR RIGHT. If we all liked the same authors, the same books, the same stories… we’d have no diversity. A “I don’t like this” opinion is as valuable to me as a “ooh… I like this” one. Maybe more so, because it may well be more objective. A “don’t like it” critique is like getting a bad review, I guess. We all better learn how to handle those and be gracious about it — because if we really want it bad enough and get our books published and out there… we are going to get our share of “This is crap” reviews.
However, if the trust in the group isn’t there anymore, for whatever reason… I think it’s better to leave. Even if it means you feel lonely again, even if you might never find a group that’s as great as the one you had. In the long run, I’d rather be lonely than unhappy and uncomfortable.
Tags: bad words, critique, critique groups, trust
