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Giving critique to someone who doesn't want to edit
JFSurvivor
Posted: Tuesday, October 6, 2015 3:49 PM
Joined: 10/2/2015
Posts: 34


So I used to be in this writing club and this one girl would hand in stories and we would give her critque and then she would bring in the next section and we found ourselves giving the same feedbback over and over again. I finally asked her if she ever edited her stuff and she said, "no." 

It drove me up a wall! I mean why join a fiction group if you aren't going to take the critque and apply it to your writing?

In the future if this happens again, what do I do? I don't want to keep giving the same crique over and over again. 


Amber J. Wolfe
Posted: Tuesday, October 6, 2015 4:05 PM

Don't critique it. Plain and simple. You have no obligation to continue critiquing a piece that the author has no plans to polish. Kindly tell the person you no longer wish to critique for them. It might sound harsh and they might bark at you for it, but there's no sense in wasting time on someone who's not serious about improving their Craft.

 

Hardened reviewer, Amber


JWillemse
Posted: Wednesday, October 7, 2015 8:46 AM
Joined: 8/23/2015
Posts: 11


   It's difficult to say without knowing what sort of advice is being ignored, but perhaps she's just too confident of her own style, in the voice with which she wants to write, to want to change Has she said acting on the advice would compromise her style?.


One of the aspects of critiques I always struggle with is deciding which points are pertinent to me - which are valid, and which are not. Even simple things like syntax and grammar, if abused for a reason, can be turned to good effect. Not saying James Joyce would get a publisher nowadays, but you know what I mean.


It's interesting to look at published books and see how many of the so-called Golden Rules of Writing are broken by successful authors - telling, adverbs, info-dumps etc.


Sometimes I think getting published is just a lottery.


T


Rhyll
Posted: Monday, October 12, 2015 4:43 AM
Joined: 1/9/2012
Posts: 22


My writers' group had the same problem. Some people only brought pieces in for A & A Awe and Admiration. Anything else and they weren't interested. If comments were made that their grammar or spelling was problematic, they would say they just wrote 'for fun'.

 

We started a sub-group for 'Real Writers'. 


 

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