Take the Critique, Not to Heart
The final assignment for my writing class is a comprehensive article built from everything we practice over the semester—plus a publishing plan. I tell students not to post their final blog assignment, but to save it as a real submission for publications.
Some have never considered the idea of sending a query letter or contacting an editor. Others write well enough that I encourage them to consider the popular press and public audience as important alternatives to academic journals.
I want still other students to walk away with a line-edited piece of work. I return their assignment, red with my tracked changes, as my final reminder of their bad habits and over-writing. It’s a take-home guide to their own quirks.
One student last semester handed in an ambitious final in need of a lot of editing. A struggling fiction writer who’d written whole manuscripts but never gotten a break, she worked hard all semester on posts around fiction and then submitted something unlike her—something nonfiction—at the end.
She took real risks in the piece, both creatively and personally, which is rare in students. The question for me, then, was how much to critique.
You can always tell an amateur writer by their affection for first drafts. Experienced writers know most of their daily effort is rough material, if not outright garbage.
Writing must eventually move from precious to practice. You get used to judging your work and always finding it unfinished, even as you submit and publish. A writer’s daily pages are as ordinary as an athlete’s daily push-ups. And you want any coach’s recommendations.
As a teacher, I know my red strewn finals affect students in many ways. Like another student said last semester, my class can be “an emotional roller-coaster.” One student’s routine corrections are another student’s personal catastrophe.
Then there are the students like this fiction writer with her nonfiction final. She needed to dig deeper, and I knew no one might ever tell her that. Most people never learn to try harder, especially about something so personal as writing, because none of us react well to the type of criticism we need.
Someone has to really care—or just be a good writing teacher—to risk your wrath with honesty. That a sincere critic is your friend is a life lesson you can only learn with time.
In my undergraduate film and graduate writing programs, I had to show or read my work without disclaimer and then take my teachers and classmates’ reactions square before I was allowed to speak. Those candid university critiques were the one thing—other than teaching—that taught me how genuinely problematic it is to communicate with anyone.
Even when you are young and foolishly think the misunderstanding audience members are the problem in the equation, you still realize you have to connect with them.
If more of the public had experience in their general education with giving and receiving direct constructive criticism on their own creative efforts, the Internet would be a different place. More of us would recognize its opportunity.
My fiction student this last semester eventually returned my heavy edits on her final. She said, “That was harsh, but who wants to be the kid the coach gave up on and put in left field?”
She asked if I would read another draft.
That’s what I want to hear.