MDL and Kitty,
I said I was going to stay out of this discussion. I don't know why I am posting again. I must be a glutten for punishment or something.
Kitty, your work is always welcome and i know you have gone through a hard time and some negative fdk on your work.
I wonder if the feedback is actually negative (i.e. something meant to hurt, to make a person stop writing forever) or if it is constructive (i.e. something meant to help, to make a story better). Comments that I've seen here have been nothing but constructive in nature -- including my own. Grammar and spelling and structure and well-developed plotting are important elements to a story. Stories are hard to read and hard to get involved with if they are not (at a minimum) written in good grammar and spelling. Kitty, so many of us have offerred you suggestions, but you aren't willing to consider them. From your responses to comments, I almost think you only read a select sentance or two from each comment and form an opinion without even trying to improve your grammar and or spelling.
The criticism is not malicious in any way. However, I can not just say "YAY GREAT STORY MORE MORE MORE" if I don't honestly believe it. As people I have beta read for can say (Julia, Roger
) that I tend to be very picky because that is how I would love my own writing to be picked apart.
I hope this shows the difference between the "negative" comments and the "constructive" comments.
Malicious/Negative comments:
God, Laura, you suck. STOP WRITING AND SAVE DISK SPACE. Stupid girl. Jeez, I hate you. Go away.
OR
Laura, you are stupid, and you smell bad. You are fat and slow and stupid and your hair is ugly. (none of it is actually true
)
Constructive comments:
Laura, you kind of lost me there. I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Why don't you try to say it like this . . . (a weekly quote from my PhD advisor at our Mon morning meetings
)
or
Laura, this is bad BECAUSE . . . and it can be improved BY . . .
I hope you see that there is a clear difference between negative and constructive comments.
Obviously it doesnt make any of us writers happy when we receive such kind of fdk, but as i said before... any fdk is fdk.
I hate to disagree, MDL, but some authors actually thrive on such comments. I have to practically BEG readers to give me these kinds of comments. I want to know what is wrong with my stories so I can improve them. I have written over 40 stories (some no longer on the archive) under the pen name Alicia U. My first stories were so bad that I took them off the archive to revise them. I am not at all a writer by nature -- I am a biomedical engineer who once had a professor tell her that her writing was worse than his 5 year old children's (and they didnt even speak english natively! I do.), so I am always eager to learn from more seasoned writers on how to improve my writing. On my early stories, two writers who I really admired, Yvonne and Christy Kubit (who I believe is gone from FoLCdom), offerred me some wonderful constructive criticism that I remember to this day. They taught me about writing dialogue and the associated grammar rules about paragraphing and commas. Carol Malo is also very good about giving constructive comments. She is helping me right now with my latest story. She taught me about limiting repitition to make a story more powerful. To some, the criticism might seem like negative feedback, but really all the critic is trying to do is help a writer become better. It is actually positive feedback. And these are the comments that stick with me. As much as I love to hear that my story is good, I love to hear even more that my story could be even better.
Maybe I am in the minority. Please, consider this an open invitation to EVERYONE that if you read my stories, PLEASE comment on anything that you don't like, that bothers you, that comes off wrong, that can be improved. Anything.
If you look at my old stories (heheheh no one can see the REALLY REALLY REALLY bad stories because I took them off the archive and they only now exist in a purple binder on my bookshelf in my closet in my parents' house
I can't say I'm sorry for that.
I will not respond to the "tone" issue because it is very hard to tell tone when you don't actually hear a tone of voice and it is just black letters typed on a plain one-colored background. You can't claim to "hear" the tone. Often sarcasm and true mean tones are confused in typeface as are joke vs. anger.
- Laura