fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3058 ]

[ SECRET POST #3058 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3058 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 042 secrets from Secret Submission Post #437.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

To be honest, it sounds like this is your very first writing class, because you seem to have zero idea of what constitutes "constructive criticism." How is it in any way a shock to you that people like to write out their fantasies? That's how novels get written. Your moral objection means literally nothing, especially in the context of a classroom writing critique.

Instead of the personally-directed "your fantasies are creepy", you should have focused on the writing, and offered suggestions on how to make it better. Such as: try adding some focus to the twenty-two year old woman, show us her motivations and personality, flesh her out as a character. Try to avoid clichés in descriptions like "curves in all the right places." Things like that.

I'm sorry, but while the "it happens all the time in Hollywood" is a slightly odd thing to add, your teacher was completely correct. You leveled judgement at a real person, instead of critiquing a piece of writing. That has no place in a writing program. If you can't accept that people are going to write about things you find objectionable, then I highly suggest that you drop the program immediately and find a path more suited to you.

they said they never called the author creepy, just critiqued the writing.

"Creepy" is an intrinsically judgmental, personal jab, no matter how you slice it.

Uh, no it's not. If there's an abandoned house at the end of my street where mysterious lights show through the windows even though nobody's lived in it for years, calling it creepy isn't personal at all.

In what world is calling a nonsentient thing creepy any way comparable to calling a person creepy?

Houses can't take anything personally, on account of them, you know BEING HOUSES.

The original critique refers to a relationship being creepy. While relationships can involve sentient people, the relationship itself is nonsentient and cannot take anything personally. Much like a house.

Re: not op

(Anonymous) - 2015-05-20 08:17 (UTC) - Expand

"Creepy" is not a fucking jab and it exists for a reason. I'm not saying it's not judgmental or that it would be appropriate for this situation (I'd make a terrible writer and I guess my empathizing so much with OP is one reason why) but it's not said to tear down someone else; it comes from a place of defense, not offense. When I'm bothered by something that's creepy it's not because I just don't like someone; it's because I feel their actions or behaviors are either threatening/demeaning or contribute to a culture that is threatening/demeaning.

And while I do think real relationships between young and old adults can exist, I also think an old man writing about his desire for young women for no reason other than that they're hot is borderline creepy, and when you consider that women in their late 20s can look just as youthful but are WAY more likely to be cognitively developed, it is definitely creepy. it's just a few years away from being legal while decades away from the other person's age. 22 years old is rarely mature and so much easier to manipulate too.

So older people are never allowed to find younger people hot, then?

I will be honest: when an old person finds someone in their 20s hot, I get creeped out.

Again, not saying it will never work, and my reaction here isn't neutral or unbiased. It's a gut reaction. It's made worse when the person is, as I said, probably not cognitively mature, and when someone's trying to build a fantastical relationship with someone just based on how hot she is without constructing an actual character.

I've had people much older than me crush on me, and depending on how old they are, my response tends to vary from "not interested" to "ew, creeper, go away". My trainer at my current job leans into the latter category. He's old enough to be my dad but consistently get a Thing for the young women at my workplace, including, I strongly suspect, myself (and I know of at least two others, one of whom recently talked to me about it and is also pretty creeped out). Fortunately for me I don't work on his shift so I never see him anymore. I've also, when I worked in a more customer service-oriented job, had old men behave inappropriately towards me in ways that they were clearly not doing towards my male co-workers. This behavior bothers me. It's not like these are people who know me well and have fallen for me as a person - they see a young, cute face and get horny and don't even seem to think about how uncomfortable that can make the people attached to those faces.

(For reference, I'm 24.)

It doesn't really matter if it's creepy or not, judgemental or not, or if you find it creepy or not. The issue is that that's not an appropriate remark for a writing critique. You're there to help them become a better writer--not to tell them your morals, or your personal tastes.

There are situations where your personal moral opinions are neither needed nor appropriate.

I think it's pretty clear from reading my comment that I'm on a tangent here.

I said:

I'm not saying it's not judgmental or that it would be appropriate for this situation (I'd make a terrible writer and I guess my empathizing so much with OP is one reason why)

I'm staying away from the whole "is this good/bad critique" argument for a reason. I'm specifically defending OP's, and people's in general, use of the word "creepy" since apparently some people think it's a personal attack.

And since we've done this before, I'll just say right now that if you're going to keep harping on the thing I wasn't actually saying because it's more relevant to the origin of the thread, I'm not going to continue to engage.

Re: not op

blitzwing - 2015-05-20 17:21 (UTC) - Expand

Re: not op

diet_poison - 2015-05-23 13:38 (UTC) - Expand

not OP either

But I thought it was kind of obvious that OP was creeped out and exasperated and thus was being a bit over-the-top in describing her critique of the author.

I didn't get the impression that she flat-out called the author creepy, especially from her later posts on the subjects (where she said she discussed the writing but not the author).

This is a very good post. 100% agreed.

I didn't critique the author at all. Here's what I wrote:

His wife too isn’t so much a character as a fantasy. She was only twenty-two when they met, she’s still lovely and curvy, she’s beautiful, she’s got all sorts of men hitting on her, but she has no personality. Even when bad things are happening, such as finding out her husband ahs Alzheimer’s, she’s still blandly sad about it, but it doesn’t matter, because she starts kissing him, and everything’s okay. She’s never really shown to be angry about the circumstances, or even truly sad about them; her emotions seem very superficial, like she’s going through the motions, which would make for an interesting story if she was a gold-digger who had unexpectedly grown fond of him, but not for a woman supposedly so in love with her husband.

Not to mention, the fact that she was twenty-two when they met, and he was in his fifties has set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head. That’s not romantic, that’s creepy, especially since we’re not given any reason for them to be in love. He makes her laugh, and he writes, and that’s it. If she’s going to fall in love with someone literally old enough to be her father, you really need to give it some more justification, or else it's hard to believe.

I probably could have written it better, but I swear, I didn't attack the author at all, and I tried to point out that, if he wanted to keep the age gap, he needed to add some reason for them to be together, and make her less of a fantasy. I did use the term "creepy", and looking at the other comments, "discomforted" might truly have been better.

That’s not romantic, that’s creepy

That was your glaring error, right there. That's a personal judgment on your part, not about the writing at all. It's like I said-- if you're going to stay in this program, you have to learn to deal with the fact that people are going to write things that you're going to find "creepy." It isn't your place as someone giving critique to make that judgment.

Your first paragraph, however, is fine, even if the tone is a bit sharp. You're making references to the character and how she can be improved-- that's good! You can still say that to make the age gap believable, there needs to be more build-up/justification, without making it about how it creeps you out. Stick with that, and leave your personal biases out of it.

That entire second paragraph could have been better summed up as "I don't believe the romance, it requires much more depth and an exploration of motivation so that the reader can understand why these two characters are in love with each other."

Creepy is a massive value judgement. Creepy (and even "discomforted") is your personal feelings on the age gap, it has absolutely nothing to do with the writing.

"Alarm bells" and "creepy" are judgments on the writer, not on the work.

"Alarm bells" for what? That the writer is a creepy potential pedo living out his dirty old man fantasies via writing corny and cliched stories? That has no relevance to how the thing was written. You're not his psychologist and you're not the cops. Leave the judgement to them and do what you're supposed to do in a writing critique workshop.

First paragraph is fine. The second paragraph... eh, you could've soft-pedaled it more and people are reacting to that, but you're not necessarily wrong. It's mostly an issue of phrasing and being more diplomatic about your critique. That's up to you, though.

Yeah, no, your second paragraph there was completely in the wrong. Personal value judgments on the content of a story have no place in objective critique and that paragraph is positively oozing "I think this is icky and gross and therefore it is bad and you are creepy for writing it."

Your first paragraph is fine.

Your second paragraph is full of needless value judgments, and moreover tells me that you're incredibly young and inexperienced, and have difficulty understanding that your personal preferences are not, in fact, objectively right and true.

I'd go even further than the others in this thread and say: The entire "critique" makes you sound very young and childish and like someone who doesn't know a thing about how professional, objective critiques work. I'd advise your teacher to go over the basics of how a proper critique should be written because you clearly have no grasp of it.

I haven't seen OP mention that their critiques were supposed to be professional and objective.

Well, I'm not sure how it works in the college they're going to, but in my university courses, the goal was to achieve a professional standard of writing when it comes to critiques. Maybe that's different in other countries, though. But in my classes, a text written in the way OP's critique was written would probably not have been accepted for sounding too colloquial.
But even if that wasn't the case/this isn't actually a college/uni-class but some other kind, it still sounds too judgy and subjective to be of any real help for the writer. Because it's not a critique of the writing, for the most part, but rather a "Ugh, this squicks me" and "but my FEELS say it's bad".

Except that's precisely the point of writing class critiques/workshopping. They're meant to be professional and objective, and if OP's class is anything like the ones I've been involved with, the expectations for the correct kind of critique would have been made quite clear prior to the workshop starting.

It's pretty telling to me that the class teacher had to take OP aside and reiterate that this kind of comment has no place in writing critique.

I think you may be confusing the kind of feedback acceptable on fanwork (where people feel the need to bring up their squicks, whether they're relevant or not, and, unlike when you're critiquing in a writing workshop, you don't actually have to read those fics) with the kind appropriate for a writing class.

OP doesn't have to mention that, because anyone who's taken a writing course that features peer critique knows that's how critique is supposed to work. The point of a writing class is to improve one's technical skills, and the point of the critique portion is both for the writer to receive feedback that is necessary for that improvement, and for their classmates to learn how to critically evaluate a piece of writing. The point is not for the critiquer to complain about how a story they're critiquing goes against their personal preferences. No one cares if you don't like the subject matter. It's entirely beside the point, because it doesn't help the writer improve their skills, it just tells them what you personally prefer.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3058 ]

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