– Or Emily and the Criticism Sandwich –
I have problems with criticism, but not in the way that you might immediately think. I fear it because I imagine every worst case scenario, every terrible comment, everything bad about my story, and I beat myself up with it.
I am extremely insecure about my writing, especially when I take risks with it. For example, I have to workshop a piece that I spent an agonizingly long time rewriting (for more info, see my last blog post). I wrote it in third person, something I don’t frequently do, because I felt like I needed to give the reader (and myself) some distance from what my character was going through. I made this decision, mostly because I became disturbed by what I was having to write about.
This was a terrible idea.
I didn’t get specific enough. I didn’t outline relationships enough. It wasn’t good enough. Better than the first draft, but not good enough. So, naturally, I began beating myself up about it. I started geting defensive about the first two forum posts about my story. I was becoming a rage monster over critiques, which is a things I hate in myself and dislike in other writers.
So, I prepared myself by saying “I tried something new. It didn’t work. My peers will suggest ways to fix it.” And I started reading the critiques – most of which started of very nicely. I read through four or five poorly disguised ‘critiques sandwiches.’
Critique sandwiches are what I call peer critiques, because I frequently sandwich the critique between two strong compliments. Like, I found something truly interesting and uniques about your piece; here’s something you could work on; but, over all, I thought it was pretty good here. That is the basic structure of the critique sandwich.
Unfortunately, you have to use this structure, even if the story is not so good. And I can tell when people bulls*** because I do all the time, though I try to be sincere in my compliments as much as possible. I realize that I did not write my story as well as I could have, and that disappoints me. So, when I read critique sandwiches that sound forced, I sort of lose resolve to work on anything ever again.
This story, however, matters too much to me. I have ideas of how to fix it, and I hope that maybe, just maybe, critiques on my piece will lean in the direction of ‘here’s how you can salvage this’ rather than ‘here’s how you can duct-tape this garbage heap and pretend it looks good.’ And I hope that these critique sandwiches are sincere, and not just there because my peers are trying to say nice things about the crap that I feel I handed them.
March 17, 2013
On Transhumanism
emigee93 Cedar Reeves, other vague tags, rewriting, short stories, transhumanism, writing Self, Writing 0 Comments
– Or The Individual Dystopia –
I am just going to make this disclaimer now: I am probably full of bulls*** regarding this topic. I’ll be making references to materials that explain Transhumanism and the like, so it’s best to go there for more accurate information. Most of this is just referencial knowledge and brainstorming that I am using to write a story. Thank you for indugling me.
Today, in my creative writing class, we had a discussion on what it meant to be human, and…sort of, what it meant to be a woman, because of a short story I rewrote a couple of weeks ago. The story that I put up and took down almost immediately. It evolved into this fairly philosophical debate about the world I was creating and the social situations I had put my character in (much to my dispair – I actually wanted feed back on how I wrote the piece, more so than my content). So, I thought of a question – had I displayed the dystopia I was attempting to adequately enough?
“No” was the definitive answer (from my own inner critic) so I went back to the drawing board. What was so ‘bad’ about transhumanism, at least in this character’s case, and why does it isolate her?
So I started with transhumanism – or H+ – which is the idea that, at some point, humanity will have the technology to enhance our strength, senses, minds, to previously unheard of heights. [For more info go here, here, here, and here.] That affects my character in this way – she didn’t choose to augment herself, and so she is having trouble adjusting. She has a tendency to blame most of her psychological problems on the tech that’s keeping her alive, which causes the people around her much frustration. She also is now faced with prejudices she previously didn’t think much of.
This is why the universe around my character isolates her. She is judged harshly almost every time she leaves her apartment. It’s difficult for her to do rudimentary tasks with out breaking things or taking too long to execute them. This forces her into a corner she had never previously been in, and sort of distils her natural sarcastic personality into this sort of cynical one.
I want to show this, and the story in its current form does not do an adequate job of really defining the world and my character’s problems with it. So, it will require another round of rewrite-your-story-from-scratch, but it will be worth it.