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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Listening to the RIGHT critique

Critique

Critique is an art of intuition. An art, just like the prose itself. Critique. It is personal stuff that will sometimes lead you in the wrong direction. To be truthful, and to get to the point, I have been working on my query submission like crazy lately, and have actually gotten lucky. 7 requests for fulls and 21 rejections. Wonderful in my honest opinion. But why?


Especially on forums we writers go on and post and we wait and we shed tears over harsh critiques (maybe that is a little over exaggerated) and we change our writing. But when do we know if we really need to change?


Taking critiques is like critiquing yourself, because many critiques are purely opinionated. For one, I have proof with my own personal experience. My query was shed and shredded on a great writers forum (AW). I was sick to death of revising and changing, so I said thank you and went back to the original and sent off 21 queries. Requests! Ka-ching! Sweet, and everyone seemed to say that something in my query didn't make sense and the plot didn't show. But I did something right in order to get such great responses. So before accepting critique, even from your closest friends, think twice. Maybe think three times. Because writing is art and art is about expressing yourself in your own prose and your own style. Everybody thinks and perceives in a different manner, and that is what makes art beautiful.


So how do you know when to accept critique?

2 comments:

  1. I was thinking of posting on the very subject in the near future.

    I think at some point, we have to trust our own abilities. If we try too hard to change our writing, it becomes someone else's and not our own.

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  2. Kayeleen,

    Exactly! I think people are too nitpicky sometimes especially those that can't suceed themselves and I was shocked because I always was very trusting to feeback. Sometime too trusting.

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