fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3058 ]

[ SECRET POST #3058 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3058 ⌋

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

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

__________________________________________________

08.

__________________________________________________

09.

__________________________________________________

10.

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

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 ]

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh

Re: Ughhhhh