...at how subjective writing critique can be. The judging I was participating in for the Cafe Doom 7th Annual Horror contest finished up today. I had all good intentions of critiquing and writing comments about each story as many of the readers/judges do. I'm less daunted by the work involved than by the overwhelming confusion.
I guess I shouldn't read what others said about stories before submitting my own comments. Here's what I don't understand: several people wrote exactly what I thought about some stories. The same people wrote things like, "This story grabs your attention at the very beginning and the ending is an unexpected twist" about a story that I would have said, "Starts slow and the reader knows by the second sentence exactly how the story will go and how it will end." How can two people have the same thoughts and feelings about some stories and completely opposite opinions of others?
The whole experience makes me wonder how helpful the comments are to the writers. This is where we remind ourselves that the way to benefit from critique is to listen to everything, consider it carefully and choose to act on it or not, remembering that if several people say the same thing, there's probably some merit to what is said.
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It is amazing, isn't it? It's like when you devour a novel in three sittings because you just can't put the darn thing down, and then your best friend says she had to put the darn thing down after ten pages because ... well, it sucked! How does that happen exactly?
ReplyDeleteAnd then there are agents. Ten might hate it, and one might love it. You just have to find that one.