Never do friends the favor of critiquing their work

When I first met a few fellow writers, I was really excited about it. I thought it was so cool to make friends with people who liked to do the same thing I did. And of course I thought that they would all love to read stuff that I wrote, and I thought that for the most part everyone was going to like what they read.

I met a few people here and there, but except for one guy I was dating, the making friends with other writers didn't seem to work out like I thought.

I signed up for a creative writing class in college. I thought that either the teacher would tell me everything was wonderful and that with a little more work I would soon be published. Or, at least that was what I hoped he would say. There was also the possibility that I would really learn something in this class, and armed with these new skills I would then write the great American novel over the summer break.

Neither of those things happened.

I unknowingly insulted a student that I really liked (over something other than writing), and a lot of others I just didn't seem to click with. One who really liked me was a little too loud for my liking. Of the original 25 students, half of them quit due to serious problems with the class, and I didn't get to know them or read their writing or anything. The teacher of the class seemed to have more important things going on. He missed a third of the class periods, and then it was a month before we actually wrote anything that would be graded.

And then he didn't really have anything helpful to say. During class, he would praise you and tell you all the things that you did right, but then when you got the story back it was graded C-. There didn't seem to be suggestions on how to make the story better, just that it somehow wasn't up to his standards.

Since the teacher wasn't around much, we decided to get together without him and read stories that the others had written. I think maybe we still didn't get much done, because we were afraid of hurting other people's feelings. But still, it felt like we were getting more done without the teacher than with him.

Still, you can't pass a college class without the teacher, and rather than have bad grades on our transcripts, six more of us dropped the class.

Regular freshman English was better, but it wasn't quite what I needed either.

Friends and relatives read my stories, but I still wasn't getting back the kind of feedback I really needed.

And then the rest of my life happened. I wrote a few things. Actually, I started writing a lot of stuff, but I didn't finish that much. Once, when I was really into writing something about vampires, our house was broken into and my computer was stolen. I mostly stopped writing for a bit, and I didn't seriously take it up again until I went back to college.

Once in a while, someone would read something that I wrote, or I would read something that someone else wrote. And even after the other person says that they want an honest opinion, what a lot of people really want to hear is that their writing is wonderful and there's no major problems with it.

If you start out critiquing a friend's writing, and you tell your friend the truth, you may end up losing a friend.

I think that people need a lot of different people reading their work and giving them advice. And maybe they do need most of their friends to pat them on the back and say "Well done" and "Good job." Everybody needs some encourgement sometime. Everyone likes to know that even though they might never be published, a few people read and like their work, so the time and effort was not entirely wasted.

But they also need people who will tell them the truth and ask the tough questions.

I went back to college. I took a few classes that required us to read and critique each others work. One of them even graded us on our ability to work as a group and edit other people's writing. It's a hard thing to get used to doing. It's hard to go and tell someone who thought he was finished with an assignment that there's a major problem and he practically has to start all over. It isn't fun to tell someone that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has already been done, and that the first one was a lot better. I don't like having to tell my new almost friend that his story about the spaceman who got out of his spaceship and fired his spacegun at the spacemonster so that he could fix his space-engine that was damaged in the spacestorm, really does seem like a bad episode of Space 1999 or maybe Lost in Space.

But, that's what the classes are for. You learn to do it. Maybe you also learn that you don't like doing it and never want a job that is anything like that. Maybe you also learn that you don't want to do this sort of thing for friends, unless maybe it is those same friends who were in class with you and they've learned to handle it.

I think that the especially bad part for me on either end is that there is so much work and time put into writing a story that you really don't want it all to be for nothing. You don't want to do major rewrites and have parts that you were happy with taken out. It would maybe be easier to do if you could read an outline first, and point out all the major problems before a lot of time and effort was made. But a lot of us just don't write that way.

And some people just like their ideas too much to change even the most obvious problems, even if they haven't actually done any of the work of writing the thing. They don't want to hear that similar things have already been done, and done better, and maybe even done so often that no one really wants to read another one. Some people just want to hear that they have a good idea, that you can't wait to read their story, etc....

I don't get paid to do this stuff. I don't do this stuff for free for friends who haven't already taken a writing class and don't really want to know that their stories aren't that good. And I'm not in a writing class now, so I don't have critique stuff for a grade.

So what is in it for me to do this stuff at all?


Maybe there's nothing in it for me. Or maybe sometimes I think I might save someone some disappointment later. Or I might be able to show someone how to fix something, or ask the right questions that would get the person thinking along different lines to fix something. Maybe someday I'll open a book and find a dedication to me, and read how invaluable my help was. Maybe someday I'll end up helping the next Stephen King, and he might recommend me for a job.
Or, maybe, there's really nothing in it for me. Maybe there's not even the good feeling of helping someone else. Maybe it is just a total waste of my time and energy. Maybe I shouldn't bother with it at all.
Maybe I should quit wasting my time trying to help other people with this sort of thing and get back to my own writing.