What Does Your Critique Say About You?

I very rarely go visit my frenemy John Oberon because he very rarely updates his site.  Sometimes I think of him and just go check to see if he's still alive.  I did that about two months ago and then found this critique of someone's story.

Make no mistake, the story is bad.  It's seriously overwritten.  But Oberon's critique is pretty nasty too.  It's the kind of thing where if it weren't on his site and there's about a 99% chance the author will never, ever see it, it would probably start a flame war.  I don't do critiques much anymore, but when I did, I didn't usually rip into people like this.  At most I would get into kind of an overly smug, Simon Cowell-ish thing.  This is more of a Gordon Ramsey thing, screaming at people and throwing shit.  I mean, he starts out like this:

You have a splendidly awful eye for detail. I'm sure you weren't aiming for humor, but just those first two paragraphs had me rolling. I vote you never post a piece portraying a male character again unless you first have a heterosexual male friend with plenty of testosterone read it, lol.

Maybe this is the pot calling the kettle black, but the kind of critique here really says as much about you as the story does about the author.  Being intentionally nasty broadcasts to anyone who sees it that you're a dick and I would definitely not want you to review my story because you'll go out of your way to to be rude.  As with most bullies, it's most likely because you feel insecure because your own writing career has been a failure.

Looking at the story, my best guess since I don't know the author is they're probably young.  Or if not young then someone who hasn't done a lot of writing previously.  The kind of overwriting featured here is the stuff that young and/or inexperienced writers do when they want to try to impress people.  Maybe he/she just read a "how-to" book or took a class or just read some high-fallutin' author like Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, or someone like that and wants to try to be like that.  That's how you get stuff like:

The smoke stings my eyes and my pupils drown in the tears meant to protect them.

That's a pretty ridiculous sentence.  First off, just a basic anatomy lesson:  the pupil is the center of the eye, not the entire eye.  So what you're saying is just the center of the eyes are "drowning" in tears?  It doesn't really make sense.  

That's the kind of thing that someone does when they're trying to find an impressive way to say the character's eyes are filled with tears.  Some of that besides wanting to be impressive is all the how-to books and blogs and so forth say not to use "clichés," so what happens is someone overcompensates and writes something original that sounds pretty bad.  If you really want to see other examples, there's a contest each year for the worst-written love scene that usually features some really bad euphemisms for sex acts.  (Sadly I don't think Eric Filler has ever won.  Or if he did, where's my trophy?!)

Much like when a young and/or inexperienced writer tries to overcompensate with weird phrases, a critic who's overcompensating for their own shortcomings and really trying to tee off on someone can end up also saying something pretty stupid.  Like this:

The first thing I noticed is the term “scream out”. Most people, especially men, don’t “scream out” unless they’re in pain or out of control in some way, like frantic or maniacal. They “shout” or “yell” or “call”. It may sound sexist, but a woman will scream much sooner than a man. The word “scream” indicates something more high-pitched and shrill. Though the scene sounds stressful, this fellow does not appear to be in any great pain or out of control. That “scream out” made me think it was a woman character until the second paragraph when they called her “Sir”, lol.

Uh-huh.  In all actuality, I thought it was a man.  And men scream all the time.  See any Gordon Ramsey show.  Football coaches, drill sergeants, and so on.  The idea that a scream is "shrill" and feminine is pretty biased and old-fashioned.  The part I would take opposition with is that "scream out" is kind of redundant; you don't scream IN, do you?  So you can just say "scream," conjugated in whatever way.

Apparently, this fellow is located just a few feet from the exit and could leave at any time, and whaddaya know…paramedics right outside the door. Talk about your good luck! And all this time, this fellow’s been inside the Mogul Plaza. Maybe it’s just me, but that name seems to indicate a pretty darn big and ritzy hotel. So this fellow was near the front door of the lobby of that hotel. Have you ever been in the lobby of pretty darn big and ritzy hotel? If not, I think you should visit one and then tell me if any of your description even slightly suggests a pretty darn big and ritzy hotel. And it’s now ablaze. All that happened before…the smoke, the chunks engulfed in flames falling from the ceiling, the charred suit…the hotel wasn’t ablaze then.

This just seems petty.  There's nothing saying it's the lobby of a fancy hotel.  So it's called the "Mogul Plaza?"  Lots of crappy places have euphemistic names.  We don't know if he went out the front door or a fire exit or a service entrance or what.  It would be better to ask the writer's intention than jumping to a bunch of conclusions and then being a sarcastic dick about it.

And if you think it is a fancy hotel lobby that he runs out of, why shouldn't there be paramedics there?  A decent hotel would of course have fire alarms.  And why wouldn't paramedics be near the front doors where victims would emerge from?  The part that doesn't make sense is firefighters would probably be there to take him over to the paramedics, but through all the sarcasm, Oberon doesn't say that.

The real problem is something that happens a lot because "how-to" books and blogs tell writers to do it by saying you have to start out with action to get the reader's attention.  In this case:

“Jeremy! Jeremy! Where are you?” I scream out his name as chunks of the ceiling, engulfed in flames fall all around me. Thick, black smoke fills up the room, as it does my lungs, from floor to ceiling. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me, and soon even that seems impossible.

The problem here is in an attempt to have an exciting beginning, the writer starts with someone yelling for someone named Jeremy.  Then an awkward description of a burning building.  Who's Jeremy?  Who's yelling for him?  Why?  Where is this place that's on fire?  

This might be exciting, but there's no way a reader can really picture any of this because we have no way of knowing what's going on.  This tactic works a little better in movies because you can see what's going on.

From reading the rest, I gather this guy is some kind of would-be superhero like Batman or maybe more like Daredevil as more of a street-level hero.  I still don't know who Jeremy is or why he was looking for Jeremy or where the Mogul Plaza is or how it caught on fire or basically anything.

Instead of trying to start in the middle of an action sequence, it probably would have been smarter to start a little before it to establish something about who this person is and what they're doing there and so on.  The thing about starting with "action" doesn't always mean literal action; it just means that you shouldn't start with pages and pages of backstory.

So you might want to start with something about this guy sneaking into the hotel.  If he's a more detective-type like Batman or Rorschach, maybe give some idea of why he's there.  If he sneaks into a fancy hotel past security and then a bomb goes off, that's pretty exciting too.

Anyway, when critiquing a story, it's a good idea to consider how your critique might look to an outsider.  Not to say that being nice means the person you're critiquing will take it in stride.  I mean sometimes I've been perfectly nice and not smug at all and someone jumps down my throat or blows me off.  Or maybe I just provide some spelling and grammar pointers and they get all pissy because I didn't comment on something else.  You can't really expect people to be grateful for a critique, but that doesn't mean you should be an asshole.

Well, it's just a suggestion. lol