Everything Is Everything

olympics pictograms come to life | tokyo 2020 opening ceremony

+ pictogram-san at the post-ceremony presser 🥺

sid with messy hair? yes.

Cool. Then say on your fics that you welcome criticism. But if a person doesn’t say that, then you don’t leave con crit.

Do you know what I do for a living? I’m a college professor and an academic editor. I actually am professionally qualified to help people hone their skills and to improve. For example, there are at least 4 things I would edit in the ask you sent me. Not the least of which is having the guts to own your opinion by not being on anon.

But you know what I do with all the professional skills I have when I read fanfic which is a hobby and a joy for everyone who engages in it? I keep my fucking mouth shut.

Because as I tell my students to be creative and share it with the world is an act of bravery. And when we are being brave, we don’t need to be ‘corrected’ by strangers, we need to be applauded for risking ourselves.

I have never felt better about someone correcting me on a fic on ao3, I’ve never improved from it, I’ve only felt like crap, and any other writer I talk to feels the same. I got better as a writer because I wrote again and again every day. And when I engage a beta, I listen to their advice because I can trust where it is coming from. A rando whose decided they know what they are on about? I don’t trust for shit. 

If you leave UNSOLICITED criticism on fanfic you suck and are a crappy person.

If I post a picture of a sock I knit and say “I cannot for the life of me figure out what I did wrong when I turned the heel, anyone have any tips?” then someone who can see what I did wrong should feel free to comment to kindly let me know what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future!

If I post a picture of a sock I knit and say “HOORAY I FINISHED THE SOCK!!! :D :D :D”, no matter how friendly, someone saying “did you know you messed up turning the heel?” is rude and inappropriate, even if they tell me how to do it right, even if their intention was to help me.

And as analogies go, I think we can all agree on this:

Say I, someone who is not a professional baker, baked a cake for a party we were both attending, and you can tell I frosted it while the cake was still warm, but you eat a slice. Sure, if you take a bite and you taste peanut butter, you can quietly say “Hey, do I taste peanut butter? It’s good but did you tell Brad not to eat this, they have a peanut allergy.” Or if you taste it and it tastes like I used salt instead of sugar, you can quietly go “I’m so sorry it tastes REALLY salty, do you want to taste it and make sure it’s right before anyone else gets a slice?”

Both of those are fair things to say because yeah, this is essentially a mistagged cake, or a cake with severe formatting errors that makes it inedible that I didn’t realize it had when I set it out. But if the cake is otherwise fine and edible, and I’ve warned for peanut allergies so Brad stays away from it, saying “this is a REALLY good cake! But next time you should wait until it’s cool to put on the frosting, it’s starting to slide off” would be rude as SHIT. I did this for fun, to provide cake to other people who might enjoy it, and I’m not getting fucking paid for baking it. I made it because I like to bake for fun and I thought other people might think it tasted good.

We can all agree that no one who isn’t being deeply rude would say fuck all about my less-than-perfect frosting unless I asked for advice on how to keep the frosting from sliding off like that, right?

a) you may know better than them, but you may not. A LOT of people online are, to put it simply, just not qualified to present critique to writers. A LOT of bad advice has been given to people. A lot of USELESS advice has been given to people that in no way serves to help the writer in any way. Assuming you know better than someone (especially when there’s a good chance you actually do not) is arrogant/snobby, and thus rude.

b) you don’t. You do not know the circumstances of a stranger, and assuming you do is so, so rude. To use the cake analogy, you have NO IDEA why they frosted that cake while it was warm. Maybe they already know how to frost a cake, and they ran out of time while it was baking. Maybe something happened and they’re an emotional mess right now hanging in by a thread and forgot you’re not supposed to do that. Maybe they forgot the event was today and had to rush. Maybe they actually have a personal preference for the frosting to be that way. Maybe they didn’t want to be there and making the cake that way was a statement. The point is, you have NO IDEA. And walking up to them - again, this is a complete STRANGER - and telling them how to do something “better” in your opinion is condescending at best, which is rude.

c) Not everyone wants to improve, and this rides the coattails of B, where you do not know someone’s situation. To use the cake analogy, maybe this person wanted to attend this function and wanted to contribute and was asked to contribute cake. They don’t mind baking cake, maybe they even enjoy baking it on occasion, but they’re not some expert on it. They have no intention of becoming an expert or running a bakery or anything. They do not care if they improve, they just wanted to bake a cake and attend an event with some friends. You, as a stranger, walking up to them to critique their cake when they’re just there to have a good time is, you guessed it, rude.

d) Giving unsolicited crit is, at its core, you telling someone “my need to tell you what I think you did wrong, regardless of whether that is correct, what your circumstances are, or what your goals are, is more important than your desire to not be critiqued.” It assumes your correction matters more than the person you’re giving it to. It does not give the person a chance to consent to the critique. And that’s rude.

Go with the cake analogy, and please remember this is a COMPLETE STRANGER to you. Assume the original situation- you’ve come to a group event and a stranger has brought cake that is good but the frosting was obviously put on warm. You go up to them and, without preamble or permission, tell them “Your cake is good but next time put the frosting on after it cools.” and then you walk away. That’s a parallel to an unsolicited critique. It’s rude. It’s so rude, and if you can’t see that that’s rude, then. idk.

The only thing I can say is look at the same situation another way. You go up to them and say “Hey, you baked the cake, right? It was good, I enjoyed the sponge. Thanks for bringing it.” and then actually engaging with them over either their situation (”do you bake often/like baking?”) or your experience (”I love baking, I do a lot of it in my spare time, I actually run a bakery”) until they are comfortable enough with you or your level of qualification to even give crit in the first place, for you to say “do you want a tip for next time?” and actually listening to their response (”sure!” or “nah I don’t really care, I just wanted to bring something this time”) is way, way better.

If you’re not willing to engage with a person as a human being prior to Imposing Your Advice upon them, then you’re not actually interested in helping them out, you’re interested in telling people they did something wrong, or looking smarter than them. And that’s rude.

Like anarchycox, I’m a trained editor. I also took two year long novel-writing subjects (one per year) as part of my professional writing and editing degree. Of that class, three of my classmates have been published multiple times, and two of them have shortlisted or won awards. As part of that subject, we had to workshop our writing. We would bring in a couple of thousand words or so, and submit it to critique by our peers.

Not everyone’s feedback was useful. And not only that, but their suggestions for how to fix the ‘problems’ they found were not always correct.

We were all writing different genres. C wrote literary crime fiction. N was writing a spy thriller. T was writing beautifully vulnerable and very funny chick lit. J2 was writing a coming-of-age new-adult novel. My bff J and I were both writing YA fantasy, and we both read a lot of YA fantasy. Our novel teacher was amazing and knowledgable, but she wrote literary fiction. There were things she’d pick up to critique in J’s and my manuscripts that were just standard conventions of the genre.

The thing is, when I’d take those annotated manuscripts home again, with a dozen different handwriting scrawled across the page, this is what I found: my writing teacher was almost always right when she pointed out bits of my chapter that needed improving. But she was almost always wrong (when it came to my MS at least) as to what specifically was wrong, and also how to fix it. Not because she didn’t know how to write, or know how to spot a good or bad piece of writing, but because she knew nothing about my genre, and hadn’t read widely within it.

My education as an editor was two years long. It wasn’t just about grammar, although that was part of it. It was also training in thinking about the structure of a piece of writing. And how to edit a book, not just how to look at the grammar. That a lot of decisions you make, even in regards to spelling and grammar, are choices of style, not questions of right or wrong. That there are different levels of ‘intervention’ in terms of how much feedback to give. For some jobs, it doesn’t matter if you notice X or Y; that’s not what you’re there to solve. You have to stick to giving feedback on the part that is your job.

When you edit a book, it’s a conversation with the author/s, not a litany of the writer’s flaws. Sometimes you’ll spot straight-up mistakes. But sometimes you just want to confirm that something you observed is what the writer intended. Perhaps you’ll spot a way of rephrasing something, or a detail that could be added to bring a theme out. But in the end, the decision is usually with the author, who will look at your notes and make a change … or sometimes write STET in the margin, which means ‘Leave this the fuck alone. I knew what I was doing.’

And if you’re proof reading, it often doesn’t matter if you notice that there’s two different Anglicisations of Stravinsky in the manuscript. It’s too late to make that change. For many printers, publishers pay by the change requested, so the publisher might only want to know if an image is entirely missing, or (say) a whole paragraph has disappeared. If the Aboriginal flag has been printed upside down on the cover (which happened to one of the Lonely Planet guidebooks for Australia). That’s one of the interesting things you learn to do as a professional editor: WHEN NOT TO GIVE FEEDBACK.

The thing is this: the authors whose books or material I’ve worked on consented to my giving them feedback. That’s part of the publishing process. Fanfic authors have not. I still remember the nerves I would have every time it was my turn in novel class to bring excerpts from my novel in. Or even when I continued workshopping with J and D after we finished our course – even though the usual response was usually ‘That was good. I want to read more.’ And I had consented to that feedback. I was actively trying to improve. Yet it was still stressful af.

You might think that giving a hobbyist author criticism is helping them to improve, but what it can easily do is make them never want to share their writing ever again. That’s not cool, man. That’s not the role of an editor. My personal feelings about editing is that it’s meant to help the author be their best. It’s not meant to break their spirit.

Ya’ll don’t have any idea how fucking brave and needed these plot lines were.

This was before Ellen came out.

This was before civil unions.

This was before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

This was when your ass could be fired, blacklisted, and shunned with no legal protections for even being hinted at being gay.

Afghanistan’s independence was in 1919.

Egypt was in 1922.

Iraq was in 1932.

Jordan was in 1946.

India and Pakistan were in 1947.

Myanmar and Sri Lanka were in 1948.

Libya and Oman were in 1951.

Sudan was in 1956.

Ghana and Malaysia were in 1957.

Singapore was in 1959.

Cyprus and Nigeria were in 1960.

Cameroon, Kuwait, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone were in 1961.

Jamaica, Uganda, and Trinidad and Tobago were in 1962.

Kenya was in 1963.

Malawi, Malta, and Zambia were in 1964.

The Gambia and the Maldives were in 1965.

Barbados, Botswana, Lesotho, and Guyana were in 1966.

Yemen was in 1967.

Eswatini (Swaziland), Nauru, and Mauritius were in 1968.

Fiji and Tonga were in 1970.

Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were in 1971.

The Bahamas was in 1973.

Grenada was in 1974

Seychelles was in 1976.

Dominica, Tuvalu, and the Solomon Islands were in 1978.

Kiribati and Saint Lucia were in 1979.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines were in 1979.

Vanuatu and Zimbabwe were in 1980.

Antigua and Barbuda and Belize were in 1981.

Saint Kitts was in 1983.

Brunei was in 1984.

In addition to that: Northern Ireland is still a British territory. So are the Falkland Islands and Bermuda.