What's Criticism For Anyway?

When you put your work out, it's like presenting your vulnerable new-born baby to the world, and inviting them to give it a good kicking. Even if they stroke its fluffy head gently, you're on constant alert to the slightest nuance that they don't think your darling infant is less than perfect. The first time I put my work out for comment the blood was pounding in my ears so hard that I couldn't hear a word of what anybody said.

And because you're so protective of your beloved, even if people say 9 nice things, you only hear the negative 10th one. Your baby can't defend itself from attack so you rush in. This is good if you're a mother literally defending her child from wolves, but not if you're an author faced with a bit of criticism.

Last week a blogger called Big Al reviewed a book he'd read. It wasn't a bad review, saying he'd liked the story telling, but that it had been spoilt by grammatical mistakes and typos. It wasn't one of the main book review sites so it possibly wouldn't have received much attention except that the author chose to respond in - ahem - a rather negative manner. A couple of comments followed. The author responded again. Big Al posted some examples of the sentences that didn't make much sense. Commenters laughed. The author responded again, reducing her comments to the admirably succinct, though inadvisable, F*** Off. And so it merrily went on, the whole thing going viral around Twitter and lots of people pitching in, and a good time has been had by all who haven't been involved.

What I have learned about criticism, from both receiving and giving it, is that people generally want to be helpful. They want your work to succeed. They will offer what comments they can to help improve the writing. They may be wrong or ignorant, but their motives are rarely bad. They don't want to hurt your baby, they want it to look the very best it can.

In fact, you should welcome criticism, not reject it. Your friends may think they're doing you a favour by saying your writing is lovely, perfect, wonderful, but the chances are they're not telling you that your baby has a great splodge of dirt across its face. You could wipe that dirt off easily, if you knew it was there.

And that's what criticism is for: to help you present your baby to the wider world in the best way possible. That's all. You don't have to agree with it but you should know that opinion is out there, even if it comes with a raft of personal preferences and prejudices - I've never liked seeing wispy baby hair tied up in little bows, for example, just as I'm not a fan of present tense narratives.

Once people get over their worries, giving and receiving criticism is a positive experience all round, and a very quick way to learn how to improve. I've seen this time and time again, both with my own writing and in class situations. I love getting feedback on my work - sure, it might make me wince at times, but I'd rather that than send my work out with a dirty face.

The bottom line is the more honest feedback you can get, the better your work will be.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website

The Happy Sandwich Goes Wrong

We're so hard on ourselves. We beat ourselves up for things that we would cheerfully dismiss in our friends and family, if we noticed them at all. I find most students are hyper-sensitive to criticism, not in a touchy way - huh, what does she know? - but in self-flagellating way - I'm rubbish, I write rubbish.

But there are exceptions to every rule. Last year I met one. This student had had some happy sandwich feedback on a piece of writing, and they'd only registered the nice top-and-tailing bit. In fact, the criticism had so not registered that they decided to submit the writing for another class exactly as it had been. And got me...

I obviously didn't use enough bread in my happy sandwich, and concentrated on the filling. Much of it consisted of technical points such as ungrammatical sentence construction, shifts in tense, inconsistent characters - things that are a matter of fact, not opinion. But there was some opinion in there too. It's sort of what I'm there for.

Oh dear. The student was not pleased. They showed me the first set of feedback (which raised the question of self-plagiarism but that was the least of the issues). I could see the first tutor had seen the same technical errors I had, had written them down there in clear prose. I pointed this out to the student, but the student instead pointed to the happy bit of the sandwich. That was all that mattered to them.

It wasn't a very successful session.

I've thought about it a lot, about the role of a creative writing tutor. Am I there to point out technical errors, suggest potential ways of improvement and help a writer move forward in their own way, recognising that their way may not be mine, and my opinions are just that, opinions. I've always thought that was it, but perhaps for some students that's wrong. They want bolstering up, confidence boosting, encouragement.

And given that getting published is so hard, is it wrong to encourage people to enjoy their work without regard to what is publishable? Except...if the course is part of an academic programme of study and not a leisure course, surely there have to be some standards that get applied. We can't all get prizes, not all the time. And it devalues the work those who want to improve, who strive to master technical problems, who put in the hours and are not content with acceptable.

The happy sandwich helps people accept criticism; this has to be a good thing. But I think as tutors we have to be aware that not everyone reads the sandwich in the same way.