Be mean, baby.

This month I am thinking about writing critique.

I am thinking about how it sucks at first, because until you show your stories to the wider world, they’re just in your head, all perfect and exciting and romantic and dramatic and scary and whatever else you want them to be. Just for you. Just as you like it.

But trying to write books for publication — even indie publication — means having to have wider appeal. And having wider appeal means you need to show your work to others, and you need to listen to them when they say they don’t get it, they don’t follow, they don’t like it.

That is super hard.

At first.

Because most likely, as with me, the first people a new author shows their stories to are friends and family. People who are not writers, people who do not understand what commercial appeal is, people who don’t understand what good writing actually is. People who, for the most part, do not write, at all, ever, and are thrilled that the new writer can put together a sentence — any sentence! — correctly and have it mean something.

“Good job!” they say. “That’s amazing! I love it!”

Which feels good.

Trouble is, these are people who know and like the new writer and don’t know writing. If they picked the story up in a book store, they likely would skim it and put it down. But even they don’t understand that about themselves, so they heap on the praise, maybe offer a few tips on grammar (which are often wrong, or at least inappropriate for fiction), and think they are helping.

And then the newbie writer (This is me, yes, totally me from twenty years ago!) takes their writing to another, more experienced writer who knows what they are doing.

And that writer, because they probably know how to give critique, rips the work to SHREDS.

Ouch.

Oh, the burns.

Oh, the sorrow. The regret. The intense desire to GIVE UP RIGHT NOW.

Here’s the thing: ain’t nobody at the bookstore gonna be nice. Ain’t no one who reads that book and doesn’t like it gonna be nice. And now that we have the internet, they will go online and not be nice very publicly.

Any experienced writer who offers honest critique is doing two very helpful and remarkable things: One, they are showing you how to improve. They are telling you the not-nice things people will think and say before they think or say them, so you can FIX IT. Second, they are trying to save you from the not-nice things people will say.

This is invaluable. It feels so mean at first, but let me tell you, there is a real difference between an honest critique pointing out real flaws and someone just being mean. The reason the honest critique hurts more is because you can see it. When you go look at your own work and re-read it and think of what the person critiquing said, you can completely see what they meant. The mean critique is just worthless, it doesn’t even make sense and should (once you’ve had practice, oh, man, did this take practice!) bounce right off. The honest critique says, well, sure, you wrote something, but man, it is bad in these really concrete, provable ways.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

But by my third or fourth critique, I was looking for that. Hoping for it. Because if someone can point out why the story is bad, and they are right, and you can understand why the story is bad, you can make it NOT BAD. You can FIX IT! But you can only fix it if you know it needs fixing!!

These days, if people are too nice in a critique, I get really annoyed. If you’re not going to tell me why it sucks, if you don’t know, then don’t waste my time. I need to know how to make people at the bookstore pick it up, take it home, get all the way to the end and go back for the next one. If you can’t help me with that, if you can’t be mean to me in a really honest way, I’m not interested. Go tell someone else how much you like it.

It’s the same when people are too mean. You can start to pick that, up, too, because these are the people who will point out flaws that don’t exist, or that you have it on good authority (someone else experienced who knows) that the flaw isn’t a flaw. Or they’ll point out something that would be considered a flaw in an academic paper, but not in fiction. Or they’ll say they just don’t LIKE something, as if their opinion is the only one that matters in the world. These are usually the people who are either A) mad that you gave them an honest critique and they didn’t understand it or B) don’t actually know what they are doing and want you to think that they do.

Don’t get me wrong, hearing what’s working is important, too. I want to know the passages that made you see what I was trying to describe, I want to know where you laughed or cried because I had you right there in the palm of my hand. So I can do more of that. But I need to know where I lost you. I need to know where you went, “Ugh, really, Mel? No.”

I guess it’s like saying you like or don’t like something during sex. Not everyone is comfortable speaking up.

Well, get comfortable, baby. Tell me what you hate.

And I will never, ever do it again.