As much as I ragged on Critique Circle for being a bunch of hyper-sensitive morons, sometimes someone there could make a good point even while being a hyper-sensitive moron.
While I was exiled from the forums for "2 weeks" I wondered if I could still post stories and critique them. I could and I had a bunch of points saved up so I posted the first couple of scenes from the story I was working on, which I'll be talking about a week from now.
The first scene has a squad of army guys in Oklahoma City after it's fallen to sorta zombie creatures. The army guys have been sent in to see what's going on in the city because satellites and drones can only tell so much.
The scene begins after things have gone to shit and they're running from the zombies to the tallest building in town, which according to Google was the Devon Energy Center. Then they have to climb the stairs all the way to the top so they can get a helicopter out of there.
The story is told first-person by the commander of the unit, Dashiell (or Dash). I thought I'd experiment where I did a couple of paragraphs at the beginning like they were his after action report. Then I switched to what was supposed to be his personal journal. I wondered if that might be too confusing. Guess what? It was. Who's narrating now? I don't get it. I mean it says "From the Journal of Dashiell Fairborn" at the beginning so who do you think is narrating?
Anyway, I think this guy must have been one of those conservative Christian groups or Mormon or something like that because any time I mentioned anything sexual he got all pissy about it. He told me he stopped reading at a part where after they escape the zombies Dash has a briefing with a female scientist and he thinks she's sexy in a hot librarian way. The guy whined it was "wish fulfillment" and stopped critiquing. So, yeah, another hyper-sensitive moron.
But he did make a sort of good point. That was that we didn't really know much about the characters. And first I'm thinking, well, yeah because the whole first scene is them running from zombies. It's not the time for heart-to-heart discussions about their hopes and dreams.
I think part of what he said was Who are they? What do they want? Well obviously they're military guys. What do they want? To live! I mean, duh. But if you go deeper to the unasked question, WHY do they want to live?
For some it would be a wife or girlfriend and/or kids. But Dash doesn't have any of those. Why does he want to live? Mostly because he's a really rah-rah gung-ho soldier guy and doesn't want to lose the battle or war.
By the time I was finishing the story, some 80,000 words later, I realized that I had some inconsistencies in the beginning with the characters. I pretty much pantsed the characters so I hadn't really defined them before I started except for names, general appearance, and basic function. It was later on when more personal details started coming out as a matter of course when there was time for talk of hopes and dreams.
I decided to rewrite the whole first scene and start it earlier. Instead of starting when things went to shit, I started on the helicopter ride in. I added an embedded reporter to the team who talks with some of the guys beforehand so we can get a little more background and more of an idea of their personalities. And I could line things up better with what I wrote later on.
The new opening scene ballooned to like 30 pages from maybe 5. The word count went from like 86,000 to 94,000! I think it probably is stronger now. And I might not have considered doing that if that critiquer, as misguided as he is about sexual stuff, hadn't said what he said.
So there you go, sometimes the squirrel finds a nut--even if it's not the nut it's looking for.
3 comments:
That’s awesome. It sounds like constructive criticism is rare on that group. But it made the story stronger so maybe it’s worth all the noise.
I've had the same experience. Eventually I had a private queue on CC with my preferred critters. I don't have the private queue anymore, but I'm still friends with most of them via Facebook.
It's great you are getting some feedback that is at least motivating certain thought processes as far as your writing goes. It's a shame that people who are critiquing others work don't have the ability to realize that (if they don't like a certain subject matter) to say, "I'm not the audience for this" rather than trash the author. The cognitive bias that this refers to in psychology is "false consensus bias." It's extremely prevalent and widespread. It's where a person believes their opinion, world-view, etc. is automatically shared by lots of others. It's why we get liberals who post memes saying that all of America is mad at the G.O.P., which is entirely incorrect. As you and I know, probably 50% of America is in love with the G.O.P. and then some 50% (give or take on any given day) hates them. Anyway...critiquing someone's work is along those same lines, "Oh...this is wish fulfillment. Clean up your act because NO ONE appreciates this stuff." I mean...it's a clear example of false consensus bias. But don't tell anyone that because they get f'ing mad as hell. I had one old woman at Meg's brunch yell at me because I said her opinion on politics wasn't shared by everyone.
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