Spoiler alert: I firmly belong to the not camp.
A post just crossed my dash that put the worst taste in my mouth. I don’t want to reblog it, but I do want to address the contents because I think the subject is super important.
The post basically boiled down to: fanfic writers are thin-skinned babies “these days” because no one can take constructive criticism. In “my day” we all sent page-long critiques like the dedicated heroes we were! It made us better writers! Moreover, if I didn’t like something, I told the writer all about it! It was my job!
Hold up, what?
I’ve been posting fanfic online since 1998. Twenty years. Pre-archives. And “in my day” we had betas if we wanted/needed/asked for them (whose critiques didn’t have an audience). We said “concrit welcome” if we actually wanted constructive criticism. We did not show up unannounced to point out a work’s flaws because that is rude. Look, I am an editor. People pay me real money to edit things for them. I would rather cut off my own fingers than burst into someone’s comments and start “critiquing” their work without being asked first.
Here’s something that needs to be addressed: fanfiction is real writing, yes, but it is, by its nature as something that isn’t monetized, a hobby. As in, a thing people do for fun. A thing that hopefully brings both authors and readers joy! The story an author posts is a gift; how dare anyone rip a gift apart in front of the gift-giver and all the other party attendees? How entitled and ungrateful can you be? Fandom is not a frigging battleground where authors learn to harden themselves for war. It’s a hobby. Done out of love and enthusiasm.
Yes, some fanfiction writers (certainly not all!!) aspire to be original fiction writers. They may use fanfiction as a training ground. They may want or benefit from constructive criticism. Still, they have to ask. They have to start the conversation. I know (think?) it’s harder to find betas these days, but it’s always worth asking around if real critique is what you want. Put “concrit welcome and even begged for” in the author’s notes and hope someone takes you up on it.
Some fanfiction writers with original fiction aspirations still don’t want criticism about their fic. Fic may be their fun-writing outlet. It may be about instant gratification (and there’s nothing wrong with that; we’re not in the business of denying ourselves pleasure out of some moral superiority here. It’s fandom). It may be the place where they post to get around their fears of showing things to others. It may be the place they take risks they wouldn’t in their original work because the stakes are lower. When you work on your original writing all day, every day—often putting that work through far more vigorous and exhausting paces than fanfic sees—the last thing you want is someone showing up during your time off to point out a frigging comma splice or shift in POV.
The point is unless someone asks for critique, you don’t know what’s going on with them. Maybe fic is the only fun thing they have in their lives. Maybe they’re writing in a different language. Maybe they are 14. Or 82. Maybe they’ve never written fiction of any kind before and this is their baby step forward. Maybe fic is just escapism. Maybe they are depressed or anxious as hell and criticism is going to push them over an edge. Fandom belongs to everyone. Not just people deemed “good” or “perfect” or “permitted” or “thick-skinned.” People don’t need to be saved from grammar mistakes or poor turns of phrase or even plotholes so wide a semi could drive through them. Authors sure as hell don’t need to be told when a reader just doesn’t like something. There is no fandom police force in charge of perfection. If critique is so important to you, advertise your willingness to beta. If you do not like a story or think it’s “bad” hit the freaking back button.
Unsolicited criticism is not helpful. Maybe you just catch someone off-guard and startle them. At worst, you may totally shatter someone’s self-esteem while they are partaking in a hobby they 100% do for fun—and not in pursuit of some unattainable perfection.
Don’t ruin a stranger’s day or week or hobby because you “know better” and somehow think you need to prove it. You don’t.
A friend and I were scowling over that same post last night, and this is a much kinder response than the one that I started writing. I love and agree with 100% of what you’ve said here, but I’d like to go a step farther, because I think that fandom’s general evolution away from negative feedback is about more than just our amateur status. I always see the assumption in the pro-unsolicited-criticism camp that negative criticism is somehow the only thing that can ever help a writer improve, and I’ve always found that idea to be absolute horseshit. Hearing things that people liked about my work isn’t some kind of newfangled emotional safety feature that’s keeping my fandom babyhood intact, it’s genuinely helpful to me as a writer. Not only in the sense that it feels nice and makes me motivated to write more, but in the sense that it gives me specific information about how a reader responded to my work which I can then use to do an even more enjoyable job of engaging my fellow fans for fun the next time I write something. Friendly positive comments ARE constructive criticism!!
Also (and I’d love to get your perspective on this as an editor?) I’ve found that negative criticism tends to be very work-specific. It’s stuff like “don’t do this particular thing at this particular time,” or “I didn’t like that this specific character said this specific thing,” etc. That can be incredibly useful during the editing phase because it helps me polish a specific piece of writing. I can’t say enough good stuff about literally every editor and beta reader I’ve ever worked with, because each one of them made the stories they worked on stronger and more enjoyable, and they certainly didn’t limit themselves to unquestioning praise in their feedback.
Once I’ve posted (or published) a story, though, I am done editing it. I’m done fixing it, I’m done adjusting it, I’m probably done even thinking about it for at least a week. I mean, sure, if you spot a giant typo, fine, let me know, but someone telling me they didn’t like the pacing or that the characterization was all wrong or that my sentence structure didn’t fit the genre or whatever is absolutely useless, both to that particular work and to my writing as a whole. The thing is done. It’s built. Unless I have unwittingly perpetuated some kind of miserable bigotry or whatever, I am moving on to the next thing, which is very likely to be an entirely different thing. I’m genuinely sorry if a reader didn’t enjoy it, but for the love of the little baby jesus in the hay, why are they still wasting time on something they didn’t like when there’s an entire internet of other things out there for them to discover???
For whatever reason, positive notes about things I did right in a story are much easier for me to carry forward and apply to whatever I might work on next. Knowing that someone liked a scene or an idea or even a particular line tells me that all the various technical things I did to make that part of the story happen were successfully deployed. Knowing what I did right for readers lets me do it again, lets me build on it, lets me ponder new directions that I might go with whatever the thing was, even if I’m doing that in a completely different story or piece of writing.
So yeah, negative feedback on completed fic or published work that’s disguised as “constructive criticism” isn’t just kind of asshole-ish and antithetical to everything that fandom means to most of us, it also tends to be genuinely unhelpful in … basically every way. Especially when you compare it to how helpful a positive comment of the same duration and detail would have been, both to the writer’s relationship with their hobby and to their growth as an artist.
THIS IS SUCH A GREAT ADDITION TO MY POST! MAX KUDOS. I agree with (and love) everything you’ve said 100%.
I think something most people don’t realize is that an editor’s (and beta’s) job isn’t to tear a work to shreds; it shouldn’t revolve around negativity at all. Ideally, an editor works with an author to yes, fix errors, but mostly to read, observe, analyze, and ask questions the author (who is so close to the work) might not have thought about. The editor is trying to preemptively ask the questions a confused reader might ask, so the reader never has to ask them. Those answers then help the author clarify, polish, and further build their work into something even better. Absolutely work-specific.
To critique or not to critique (of the unsolicited kind)
Published
tora42's nonsensne 