How To Read Criticism: I participate in Critters, an online writers group run by Andrew Burt, a big SFWA guy who does a lot to try to bring up fledgling writers and get them published. It's basically just a bunch of people who send in their stories and then everybody critiques whatever manuscripts they want that week. Sometimes it can really feel like the blind leading the blind, though, so I thought I'd post a quick summary of how to read amateur criticism.

First, anything that the critiquer (or "critter") says, when they are speaking as a reader, is the truth, whether you like it or not. For example, if somebody says, "I found your manuscript boring," there is no way you can dispute that. It is the truth. You can rant, rave, get offended, be hurt, argue that it was non-stop action from start to finish, but it still remains a fact that the reader found your manuscript boring.

Note that I did not say this means your manuscript is boring. It may not be. But at least one reader thought it was.

This also applies for judgments the critter makes as a reader, no matter how strongly worded or holier-than-thou they sound. If he had said, for example, "Your manuscript is boring," or "Your characters are thin," just mentally turn those statements down one dial point, and realize that what he's saying is, "I thought your characters were boring," or "I thought your characters were thin." You can't argue with it--it's how he felt as he read it, and it's real.

So deal.

This goes for anything. If they mixed up whose wife a character was supposed to be, or if they couldn't make sense of that paragraph that 10 other people thought was lovely, or whatever--you can't argue with it. Because you're not arguing about whose wife the character really is, or whether the paragraph is really lovely or not; you're arguing about their experience as a reader, and they know what their experience was better than you do.

Again, this does not mean you have to change the paragraph or include a clearer explanation of whose wife the woman is.

What it does mean is that whatever the reader is saying isn't wrong. It's the truth. It's the experience they had as they read your story.

Second, anything they suggest as a writer, you can feel free to take with a grain of salt. If they say, "You should put a twist ending in this story," feel free to disregard that. They don't know anything more about what kind of ending your story should have than you do. You came up with the story, you know your goals and objectives for the story better than they do.

Again, tone the criticism down a notch. What's this person trying to say? In this case, it's really something like, "I found your story predictable." So again, his diagnosis is legitimate, but his prescription may or may not work for you.

Grammar, however, is a two-edged sword. A lot of the grammar advice you get on critters is wonderful, and should be taken letter-for-letter. In fact, most of it's that good. However, a couple of critters, I hate to admit, seem to grammar check like Microsoft Word. So be careful. Not even all grammar advice is good.

And especially beware of people who make up "rules" for writing. "Every story must have a try-fail cycle," or "Stories must have a twist ending," or "Stories must NOT have a twist ending," or whatever. There are no rules for writing. For every story that follows their supposed "rules," a thousand stories break them.

Sometimes these people really, really believe these rules. In most cases, you can ignore them if this is the case. The rule probably doesn't apply to your story, they just have a distorted sense of the rule's importance.

However, other times their "rule" is their way of telling you something they saw as a reader. If they say, "Every story must have a try-fail cycle," maybe what they're trying to say is that it seemed like every character got what they wanted whenever they tried it--that your story lacked suspense.

So even though the "rule" might be nonsense, the criticism may still be legitimate.

Finally, if anybody claims to know what type of manuscript "Editors" are looking for, go ahead and laugh deep and loud.

You get these all the time. "This story is in the first person, and Editors don't really like the first person," or "This story has a downbeat ending. Editors want upbeat endings."

The silliness of this is obvious. We've all read stories in the first person in magazines. We've all read stories with downbeat endings in magazines. We've all read stories that violate every one of their rules in magazines.

The fact is that editors are looking for one thing: Good Stories. You can write an omniscient viewpoint story with a downbeat ending that's told in the present tense and violates all the "rules" everybody says editors have, and still sell it, if it's a good story.

And that's your ultimate goal, when you do your rewrite.

You know what your goal was when you wrote the story, what you wanted the story to be. The critters have come back and told you what it was you actually did. Now your job is to go back and make it into the story you meant it to be. Or, if you've changed your mind about something, make it into the story you now know it can become.

You now know what scenes worked for people and which ones didn't. You know what characters you thought were really cool get under people's skin.

So you can go back and modify your story, concentrating at every point on trying to get the reader to want to read the next line.

And see the world as only you can provide it to them. In a story that's uniquely you.