Generally speaking, pre-publication critical comments fall into two broad groups: reader reactions (“I started skimming right here.” “This whole section confused me.”) and specific suggestions (“Have ninjas leap through the window!” “I think you should cut the grandmother character.”) Both require some thought, but along different lines. (This is true even if it’s an editor making the comments; the only difference is that you have to listen more carefully to editors. Your friends’ advice, you can blow off if you want to, though if you do so regularly they will stop giving you comments.)
Reader-reaction comments are frequently the most difficult, because often the person commenting can’t really articulate why they were skimming or confused. If you ask, they say “I was bored” or “I couldn’t follow it,” which you could already tell from what they were doing. The writer has to figure out for him/herself what, if anything, needs to be fixed, as well as how to fix it.
For this kind of comment, the main thing the writer has to watch out for is their own assumptions. Writers usually know their critiquers fairly well, unless it’s a new crit group. It can be easy to dismiss a comment because “he always objects to that” without stopping to think that perhaps one has a bad habit of doing that thing he objects to. And even if he is super-sensitive to that thing, it is still possible that this time, he’s right. On the other hand, it can be equally easy to assume that a trusted commenter must be right, and fail to recognize that this issue is a hot button or an item of vast disinterest to them…and it might be neither to most other readers. Sometimes a personal reaction is idiosyncratic, and that’s really all there is to it.
Reaction comments are my favorite sort, because they’re not telling me what I should do.
Specific suggestions come in several varieties. There are those that are obviously wrong-headed (“No, I cannot have wizards fix it. This is a space opera; it has no wizards in the story.”), those that are equally obviously right (“Why didn’t I think of that?”) and the ones that sound plausible but that the writer isn’t crazy about. The ones that are obviously right usually don’t need much consideration, though it’s still advisable to wait a day or two before implementing them so as to be certain they really are as obvious as you thought they were. The other two need to be thought about.
No, I’m not saying you should consider adding wizards to your space opera, though you might want to save the wizards-in-space idea for some other story. Sometimes, though, the “obviously wrong-headed idea” can turn out, upon consideration, to be not so wrong-headed. More important, though, is the fact that your critiquer managed to read your story in a way that made him or her think that having wizards in it was the obvious solution. At least nine times out of ten, this means that there is indeed a problem with your story, but you will have to figure out for yourself just what you did that made this person think his/her wrongheaded suggestion was the perfect thing to do.
There are also occasions when someone will suggest a totally wrong-headed solution to a very real problem. Often, this is because they can’t articulate what the problem is. This is especially common for pantsers, because in their own work the “figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it” part happens in approximately half a nanosecond, well below the conscious level. They go straight from “This bit isn’t quite right…” to “Ninjas jump through the window. No, wizard ninjas! With ray guns!” They do their critique the same way, going straight from “Something’s off …” to “Wizards will fix it!” without realizing that yes, wizards would fix it if there happened to be wizards on this spaceship, but since there are no wizards in this universe, their suggestion won’t work.
The hardest comments are the ones that sound plausible – and that may even have very logical, well-thought-out, passionately argued reasons behind them – but that the writer isn’t crazy about for some reason. The most important rule of thumb for this sort is, “If you can’t see the problem yourself, don’t try to fix it.” Because if you do try, you’ll likely mess things up worse than ever. This does not absolve the writer from trying to see the problem, but sometimes you just can’t. If you can’t, don’t mess with it.
The next step is to consider what the problem is that the suggestion is trying to fix. Quite often, once you know why the commenter has made this specific suggestion, you can come up with your own fix that doesn’t do violence to your story. The spaceship has no wizards aboard, but perhaps you could add an alien tourist character with the information and/or skills they need. You don’t want ninjas with ray guns leaping through the window into your Victorian tea party scene, but a cat proudly presenting a dead rat might well stir things up just as much.
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
—Neil Gaiman
“If you can’t see the problem yourself, don’t try to fix it.”
This is why I need discussion in my critiques. Sometimes it takes me a *lot* of discussion to fully understand what isn’t working and why. If I try to guess for myself based on only the initial comment, I’m almost always completely wrong.
Great points!
The reader reaction can tell us that *something* needs to be done — but not necessarily what.
Which is one reason why making too elaborate suggestions when making critiques is unwise.
Suggesting wizards is one thing. Going into great detail about their use is wasting the writer’s time if they are off-base. (Had a story where I hadn’t made it clear that a ruin was human, not alien, and three-quarters of some critiques were useless because they started by saying it was unclear, and then gave a lot of suggestions about the non-existent aliens.)
When I’ve critiqued writing for people I generally put a ? mark and an arrow pointing at the offending section for that reason. Sometimes I can tell what is wrong, esp if it’s simple (an unclear pronoun, for example, or using the same word too many times in a paragraph), but if I’m not sure then I just use that as my symbol for the writer to know that something probably needs doing about the section in question so they can figure it out. (I also use a smiley face for sections I particularly like but am not sure why, for a similar reason.)
A friend of mine once got a short-story manuscript back from an editor with the rather cryptic “Fix this” scrawled across the first page. He never did find out what needed repair.