So. I'm on three Discord groups for writing. Combined, they have around 40,300 members. I actually joined them for feedback purposes. But as usual, it's been a waste of time.
I don't know which groups you're on. But if you're looking for crit partners, quality is far more important than quantity. A large Discord server just means the folks in the server have done a good job promoting it. It says nothing at all about how engaged the members of the group are with one another, or the quality of that engagement when it does occur.
I was in an online critique group once, hosted by a popular Canadian author. The overall group was broken down into smaller groups, and members could review the content being posted in the different groups and decide which one they wanted to join.
So I had a look. A lot of the group members were young kids with precious little writing experience and zero prior critiquing experience. I knew they were not going to be a help to me. A lot of the more experienced members were posting only romance. And I don't read romance. They would ask for feedback on scenes describing the physical appearance of the main characters. How am I supposed to give that when I don't care? If you describe your character's physical appearance to me, I will gloss over anything that doesn't significantly impact how they function in their world. Tell me your character has gills so can breathe underwater, and can change the colour of their skin at will to camouflage with their surroundings and you've got my attention. Tell me your character is tall, dark, and handsome and it doesn't matter one iota how creative or "fresh" the words you come up with to say that are, I haven't paid attention to them because I just don't care. (The author who hosted this group specified in her first novel that the MC was blonde. I read the entire novel. Totally pictured the MC as having dark hair. Sometime after finishing the novel someone mentioned to me--or I read somewhere--that the MC was supposed to be blonde. I said, "She is?" I went back and re-read the first few pages of the book. And sure enough, the author had written that the character was blonde. But the character's blondness had no impact on the story whatsoever. So my brain had completely ignored it.)
Does this mean that including in your book long descriptions of details of your character's physical appearance that have no relevance to their story arc is a bad idea? If you want your book to grab my attention, probably. If you want your book to interest people who read romance fiction, however, I'm guessing not. So my telling a romance author, "I don't care what colour your male lead's hair is or how high his cheekbones are," isn't helpful feedback.
Anyhow... I chose a group to join which included two people who were writing at my level, and giving feedback at my level, one of whom was actually writing science fiction. And the person who was writing science fiction promptly used my joining the group as permission for her to leave it. ("Now that you've got some fresh blood, I won't feel bad about making the group too small. So I'm going to jump over to this other group where people will be tougher on me.")
The other group member who wrote at my level didn't post anything for critique at all for several months. Which meant she was also not obligated to provide any critiques herself. This person was the group leader, and did critique anyway. But participating in the group came with one rule:
if you post something for critique in a given month, you must provide critiques to two other members who post their own content that month, and one guarantee:
if you post something for critique, at least two members of the group will provide you with feedback within the month. The group leaders were meant to ensure the rule and the guarantee were both observed. So she saved her critiques for people who had not yet received their guaranteed two minimum. For some reason my content always received critiques from other group members quickly. So the group leader seldom provided me with any feedback.
And the feedback I did receive?:
"I did not find any spelling or grammatical errors in your piece."
I kid you not. That was the entire content of one of the critiques I received. English is my native language. I speak and write it fluently. And when I'm preparing content for other people to give me feedback on,
I proofread my freaking writing before submitting it! So of course this "critiquer" didn't find spelling or grammatical errors.
Another person left comments that were so out-to-lunch I'm pretty sure he was drunk when he wrote them, but they basically boiled down to: "I think you should have your main character speak like this:..." followed by a line reading for the MC written phonetically with a very thick accent in a piece in which I did not use phonetic spellings to denote any kind of accents at all.
Another time I took an online writing course--that I'd actually paid money for!--in which students were meant to post excerpts of their work and get feedback from other students. But the class was not genre-focused. I was writing science fiction. But most of the other students had apparently signed up as part of some church group, because they were all writing Christian fiction. (To be clear: Christian fiction is a pretty broad category these days, and includes Christian science fiction. But none of these people were writing that.) Anyhow...
I posted an excerpt of my work, which mentioned that the characters had "FTL technology," and everyone--EVERYONE--in the class said: "What's FTL technology? You need to explain that!"
But should I explain what FTL technology is, just because everyone in my online writing class said I should?
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no fucking way. NO! If you waste words on explaining what FTL is (or "jump drives" or "hyperspace" or "space gates" etc.) to science fiction readers, they will assume either a.) you are a moron who has no clue how to write or (even worse) b.) you think they are morons.
People who read science fiction understand that, in space opera, technology often exists which enables characters to travel faster than the speed of light. Sometimes authors come up with what they believe are cool descriptions of
how their FTL technology works. (Which is all really just hand-waving. Physical matter moving faster than the speed of light is not possible within the laws of physics of our universe. Yet it is
necessary to tell stories about civilizations that span intergalactic distances. So it is a convention of the science fiction genre that authors can have FTL travel if they want it. It's magic that, by genre convention, we pretend is science, in order for space opera stories to work.)
But no one explains
what FTL is. To do so would be equivalent to a romance writer writing, "Dirk was a tall, dark, and handsome man who could walk upright. Which is to say he was bipedal and could ambulate his body across level ground by pushing off from the ground with one foot while balancing on the other, and then swinging the now-airborne foot forward via a long limb called a leg which was attached to the rest of Dirk's body at his hips, all while he kept his broad, muscular shoulders roughly centred above his hips and used his arms to do non-ambulatory things, such as swiping left on Tinder."
Trust me: you can receive all sorts of feedback on your writing and have it be completely and utterly useless to you.
How am I supposed to improve if nobody's even willing to look over it?
Same way all of us improve at anything: through practice, and through study.
Keep writing. Keep reading. Read for pleasure first. But then take a second look at the books you enjoyed. What did you like about them? What did you like about the pacing in
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet? What did Becky Chambers do to achieve that pacing? What are you not liking about the pacing of
Leviathan Wakes?
The one thing of value I did receive out of participating in critique swaps was the learning I did as a result of analysing other people's work. That work helped me to see better what I was doing well and what I was doing poorly in my own writing. But I quickly figured out I could do this same work by reading published authors. And doing the work privately on published texts was a more efficient use of my time as it meant a.) I could guarantee I was always reading work relevant to what I write, and b.) I didn't have to worry about phrasing feedback for unskilled writers in ways unlikely to make them cry and give up writing forever.
I wish I could get to the point where I don't care about them reading my work anymore, where the most important thing is me holding all those hours and hours of work in my hands and I can say: this was for me, if someone else enjoyed it, good for them.
A crit partner isn't going to help you get to this point. This is something you can only achieve by working on yourself.
from
So, meh.
from
--gehhhhhhh--
." And the next thing I know I'm lying on the ground and some very concerned person is staring down at me, asking if I'm okay. (I am really not looking forward to next summer, having been forced to move into a place with no air conditioning and no living space in the basement.)
WotD, 5 sets, 1 min rest
