Meta: Thinking About Concrit

[alixtii]

Annoyingly Obligatory Disclaimer: These opinions posted in my personal journal are, not surprisingly, my personal opinions. Now I happen to think that my personal opinions are right--I don't think all opinions are of equal worth, and unsurprisingly I privilege my own--and in some cases even normative. This does not mean that I think everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot or a moral monster, or that I don't recognize the logical possibility that I can be wrong.

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The Critical City on a Hill: Thoughts on Concrit and Its Role in the Fannish Community

People have been saying extremely interesting things about concrit, and have gotten me thinking about these things. In this post, peasant_ defines concrit as such:

Constructive Criticism, that is critical commentary on a fic that addresses both faults and successes in the story. By definition, to be constructive it must be carefully worded so as not to hurt the writer as an individual.

I agree with the definition, but more and more I think that the term is somewhat ill-chosen. "Constructive" criticism implies that it is going towards "building" something, usually the craft and skills of the author, and I mostly agree with karabair that constructive criticism isn't the best mechanism to help a mediocre author get better, and that there's probably no saving at all for a poor author (here and here). But I don't think that's what concrit is for, ultimately.

Of course, sure, I do want to become a better author (mainly so as to better serve the interests of my fannish community), but that's not why I desire concrit. I like concrit because it's more honest. If someone tells me that they think Kennedy was acting out of character in paragraph 7, then that means I can all the better trust them when they tell me that the fic is wonderful and they loved it. Otherwise, I'm left wondering if the fact that the feedbacker picked out a sentence from the penultimate paragraph means that she thought the rest of the fic was drek. Are they mentioning the thematic richness because the plot was horribly structured?

It's one of the paradoxes of human existence: we want positive feedback, we want to hear that we are the greatest writers who ever lived, but if that feedback does not contain content which is critical (in the negative sense) than that feedback is worthless, meaningless sycophancy. It should take its place next to the other paradoxes of our time, the Oedipus complex (we want to rejoin the mother but keep our separate identity) and the will-to-power (we want to have mastery over others, but if they don't have mastery over themselves our mastery is meaningless).

We all know how to give positive feedback: you find the nice things you can honestly say about the story, and you say them, and you shut up when you don't have anything nice to say at all. And sure, a sin of omission isn't nearly as bad as a sin of comission. And sure, only a jerk would knowingly hurt someone's feelings even in the name of honesty (unless they honestly think that hurt feelings now will be less than later, as with the person with spinach stuck in her teeth). But that doesn't change the fact that positively-only feedback fundamentally aims to decieve.

I have this vision of a fannish community where people have the necessary distance so that critical discussion of their stories and ideas is not felt as a personal attack against them, where ad hominem attacks never happen, and where people can engage passionately in debate and then perform the fannish equivalent of all going out to dinner afterwards on the fandom's expense account. In many if not most fandoms, I recognize this cannot be anything but a pipe dream. There are two many newbies, two many raw emotions, too many teenagers. But I don't think this is true across the board, I don't think this hurts its value as an ideal (we should work for the Kingdom), and I think LJ's ability to form like-minded communities can to a great degree mitigate this effect. My flist can, and to a great extent does, live out this vision.

It's not so much the "Cult of Higher Standards" that peasant_ talks about because I'm not so interested in having better writers in fandom. We (i.e. Buffy fandom) already have wisdomeagle, karabair, liz_marcs, nwhepcat, m_mcgregor, and so many others and I don't think I could stand to devote any more time to reading fanfic anyway. femslash_minis produces ficlets of incredible quality every two weeks. As long as they keep writing, I could(n't) really care less what happens to the bad writers in fandom. I'm interested in having a community of better readers. If concrit is ultimately constructive in any sense, it is that it strengthens this community.

In my experience, allowing both positive and negative criticism opens the range of what a critical responder can say, and thus what thoughts arrive on the critical scene. Allowing only positive feedback stifles expression. What can you say which is truly interesting, insightful, or thought-provoking about a story if you are restricted to only those comments which are unequivocatively positive?

And as a writer, I'm invested in the story and I want to know what people think about it. Not because I want to get better (although I do), karabair is right that my reaction to the majority of the negative feedback I receive will be to re-justify my decisions to myself and then ignore it. And that's perfectly okay. I value critical feedback because it shows that the reader cared about my story and wants to think about it. That they took out time to notice the elements they mentioned in concrit--theme, plot, character, whatever--and think about them in relation to a set of standards more complicated than "I liked this," regardless of whether they ultimately decide my use of these devices to be successful or not. As a writer, I approach this is the greatest compliment a reader can pay to me: thinking deeply and fully about my story.

Now, not all of us are prepared to provide detailed, thoughtful concrit; for one thing, it takes a lot of time and thought (which is why most people would only bother giving it to stories worth that much thought in the first place). Sometimes one doesn't know what to do but squee. There are plenty legitimate reasons not to give concrit--I'm not saying that you should be giving more concrit, whoever you are--but it saddens me that people who want to and would give it may find themselves silenced by the so-called "Cult of Nice" conventions. (As to whether the cult actually exists, I remain firmly agnostic.) I'm not saying that concrit is always better than squee (it isn't!), but the subject at hand is the value and worth of concrit apart from its ability to improve the writing skills of the author.

This is not to say I am unambiguous about concrit. One of the things I love about it is also one of the things I fear the most: the way it creates a dialogue between author and reader. In many ways, this is what I relish about concrit, a discussion about the dynamics of the text I created and thus love. However, despite the fact that the feedback is left in my personal journal, is addressed to me, and my heart really calls out for this sort of dialogue, the fact nonetheless remains that I am the person least qualified to take part in it. I'm too caught up in the process of production to be able to talk about the dynamics of the text as it stands. And so I find myself forced to remain silent in the face of negative criticism. Let's say a reader responds that she doesn't see the function of a certain scene. I know what I intended the scene to do, but not whether it succeeded, and thus I find myself either answering with a simple "Thank you for your honesty" when I could say so more, or by surrounding my comments by extensive intentional fallacy disclaimers. However, this is characteristic of all feedback on LJ, not just concrit; the format by its nature privileges the author. It's simply that insofar as concrit is more developed than squee, it provides a greater opportunity for a critical misstep. Also, I don't know any author who is afraid to take credit for the good elements of her or his text regardless of intent; warring interpretations form a much bigger problem if the criticism is negative.

Maybe it'd be better if we responded to other people's crit, agreeing and disagreeing with what they say, so that the author would become but one un-privileged voice among many but still able to take part in and enjoy these critical discussions, but we've seemed to have evolved the fannish convention on LJ that even though these conversations are public, feedback should still be a conversation solely between each individual feedbacker and the author. Disagreeing with someone else's feedback would be seen, I'm afraid, as one of the most heinous of personal attacks. I'm not sure why this should be so, but I do think that it is lamentable.

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Because "craft" has implications for the finished product. Craft and meaning aren't entirely divorced.