The Art And Obligation Of Responsible Criticism

Navigating the minefield of creative enterprise and the fragility of artistic souls

I am highly critical of most things, opinionated to a fault, but somehow oddly hesitant to denigrate the work of others, especially to their faces. I often soft-sell the depth of my criticism because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I may reject the submission while glossing over the obvious flaws, allowing me to extricate myself from the proceedings with as little conflict as possible. No reason to be rude, I tell myself.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m doing them any favors. I might even be making things worse by not being honest with them. I don’t believe one has to be cruel about it, but I could be more straightforward with my criticism so that they can learn something. I’m not actually protecting their feelings by withholding my honest opinions; I’m protecting my own. I don’t want to be the bad guy, and I certainly don’t want a long conversation about it. I want to say no in such a way that it causes me as little pain as possible, and apparently, I’m willing to hurt you in order to save myself, all in the guise of being kind.

It takes exponentially more brain space and mindfulness to craft a meaningful response, and I don’t always have the time or energy to do so. It’s the reason legacy publications and literary agents tell you that they can’t respond to every query. If it’s not good enough to buy or fix, it’s not worth spending a lot of time talking about.

Natasha MH, Ellemeno’s esteemed Managing Editor, has spent her career in a variety of roles, some corporate and some academic, that have put her in a position to act as either a teacher or a mentor to many aspiring storytellers. She seems to thrive in this environment.

Being from Malaysia, where she now lives, but having lived for extended periods in both the UK and the US, she brings a unique cultural perspective to the proceedings. I consider her a tougher critic than I am, not because she has higher standards, but because she is more willing to be honest with the writer. She was a teacher and a mentor, and there’s no point in being either if you’re not going to be critical of your students’ work. How else will they learn?

I’m sure plenty of writers get upset with her, but they don’t appear to feel judged by her. Writers are, by nature, fragile souls with massive egos who are searching for recognition and praise, not criticism. We want to hear how great our latest effort was, not what we need to work on. This is not how Natasha views her role. She can be your biggest cheerleader, but she’s not here to sugarcoat things for you.

I tend to be a little too flippant in my criticism and not earnest enough with my praise. I feel the same way about reviewing restaurants. If I love it, I’ll say so, but if I don’t care for it, I’d rather not talk about it. Life is difficult enough as it is, and there’s nothing more vulnerable than making something and showing it to the world. I have no interest in making life more difficult for any artist.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit like being a parent. If you don’t correct your children when they’re young and learning, they’ll grow up to be entitled douchebags, and we can’t have that.

Years ago, I used to golf a good bit and became quite proficient. I took lessons from the pro at the club, and he would stress the difference between offering a tuneup and making fundamental changes to your game. If I were merely looking for a little help before a round, he might offer one approach, but if I were truly trying to upgrade my game, he was going to have to break my swing down, and I was going to get worse before I could get any better. How well did I want to play? Slightly better today, or significantly better next fall? This would inform how much he was going to mess with my game. It was up to me.

I often took the easy path because I wanted to play well that day, and that’s what I think a lot of writers do. We want to play today. We don’t want to put in a bunch of work so we can play better next year. We want our gratification as instantly as we can muster it.

As an editor, I’m willing to offer you a tuneup, but I’m not going to break down your swing. It’s not what I do. I’m trying to publish a magazine, not teach a course on writing, certainly not for free. If a story you’re submitting is fundamentally sound, but has a few flaws, any editor worth their salt is going to help you fix those flaws. If they’re telling you the entire piece is flawed, there are going to be no easy fixes, and it’s probably not worth working on. Better to start fresh and try again.

I could take anyone’s premise and rewrite it to make it a better story, but then it would be my work and not theirs. Going through a story word by word and explaining why it’s not working is more work than just rewriting it, and too large a task to ask of someone. It’s like handing someone a dictionary and asking them to just put it in the right order. You’re better off working on something else.

Sometimes, I find it valuable to restructure a submission so that the author can see the effect of what you’ve done. Sometimes a piece is too linear and needs to be mixed up, and other times, it’s not linear enough. I will do this from time to time, but it’s a lot of work on my part, and detracts from the time I have to write stories of my own. I consider that a big ask, especially for no pay, and more than I’m willing to do.

For most of my career, I was a Creative Director, in charge of a department of writers, art directors, and graphic designers. I preferred hiring recent graduates, fresh from school, with a lot of natural talent and very little experience. I found that it was easier to teach people the way I wanted things done than get them to unlearn bad habits they’d discovered elsewhere. I looked for raw talent and taught them the rest.

Consequently, there was a real learning curve that was required if they were going to make it. It entailed my teaching more and doing less. I tried not to fix things myself whenever I could, but explained the problem and how they might go about fixing it. In an advertising agency, you don’t always have the benefit of time, so occasionally I would have to just do it myself and try to explain what I was doing and why. The former solution is a much better learning experience because it forces you to form new neural pathways towards critical thinking, but if you were paying attention to the lesson, the latter can be effective as well.

This becomes the balancing act of editing for me. How much trouble do I go to in order to teach a writer how to be better? It’s faster and easier for me to fix things and let them learn by example than it is to break it all down for them and explain how and where they went wrong. If I’ve hired you and therefore have a personal investment in your success, it makes sense to take a long-term approach, but if you’re submitting a story to a publication I edit on Medium, not so much.

I imagine there are other ways to think about all this; strategies and tactics that others use. I’m not dismissing any of them or saying there is only one way to do things. I’m not even claiming to be doing it right. I’m simply trying to illuminate how I operate.

I am trying to think of ways to improve my interactions by being more candid and straightforward, worrying less about things I can’t control, such as others’ feelings. If you’re a new writer and you submit a story to a competitive publication with a high bar of entry, you should expect a strong critical response.

The work had better be damn good.

The traditional response to work I don’t think is good is to say, “it’s not right for us.” Sometimes, this is accurate, such as a piece that delves into a topic we don’t cover or uses a style we don’t accept, but more often than not, it’s because it’s not good. I am trying to come up with a better way of saying “this is not good,” or at least “not good enough,” that isn’t overly offensive. This piece doesn’t work as written.

What I find especially tiresome are the writers who claim to have read the submission guidelines and still have the gall to send in substandard work because they’re too green to know any better. When you saw “this isn’t a place for beginners,” you didn’t think we meant you, even though you said in your submission that you were new to writing and the platform?

I suspect that the problem lies in how writers view themselves, specifically, whether or not they think they’re talented. It’s like the people who go on reality shows like American Idol, confident in their chosen path, only to prove to everyone that they’re completely tone deaf and talentless. They are confident without merit.

Writing is a little different in that it’s almost always a matter of experience. Only would-be writers even try. It’s not something anyone else even thinks about. If you want to be a writer and you work hard enough at it, you’ll end up being a writer. The thing is, if you don’t have a lot of experience, your writing is not going to be very good. It might show promise, but it’s probably not ready for publication. That’s why I am constantly telling writers that they need to write. Publishing is not writing. Writers write. Publishing is something else entirely.

If you ever want to get to a place of excellence, you have to have standards, standards that require enforcement, and enforcement entails gatekeepers. No gatekeepers, no standards; no standards, no excellence. It’s certainly equitable and meritorious, but it also sucks.

We have a real gatekeeper problem in our culture. All the self-publishing advocates spent all those years railing against the powers that be, the gatekeepers in charge, for keeping everyone from the joys of publishing. So now, everyone gets to publish anything they like, regardless of quality or integrity, and we’re drowning in mediocrity if not outright slop. Congratulations! You’re now on equal footing with a guy who calls himself Catturd. Good hustle.

One of the problems with making publishing seem simple and democratic by having blogging platforms is that it gives people the misperception that publishing should be easy or have a low bar of entry. Anyone can launch a blog and begin posting their own stories, but that’s not publishing. It’s posting.

If you want to submit your work to a publication, presumably it needs to be better than if you were just going to post it. That may or may not be true, depending on the publication, but I don’t see any reason for having publications if it’s not. Why bother going to all the trouble of managing a publication if you’re not raising the bar on quality?

I will let you in on a little secret. When you’re first finding your voice and learning the craft, you don’t necessarily want a large audience. If you’re doing standup comedy, you’re going to bomb from time to time, quite a lot, in fact, when you’re first starting out. You want the relative safety of bombing in front of a small audience in a comedy club, not in front of tens of thousands in some massive arena, or live on international television.

We think we want the big audience right away, because we assume it will be good. That is our real failure of imagination, that we can’t imagine falling flat on our faces. In our fantasies, we are greeted warmly and openly, praised for our originality and candor. Reality is a much tougher audience. Some things are best practiced in private, rather than on the world’s stage.

I was drawn to publishing my stories the minute I realized I could, through the use of numerous blogs and social media platforms. I also spent years writing in journals and diaries, both physical and digital. I get the attraction of believing someone might read it, if only we put it out there. It feels more hopeful than just hiding it under lock and key. But there’s a difference between revealing it to your friends and family and asking for it to be judged by the world.

No one is going to be overly critical of your blog post. It’s an online diary, and you get to write whatever you want in it, but the moment you submit it to a publication for review, you’re asking to be judged. Both the piece of writing you’ve submitted and yourself as a creator. I wrote this thing. What do you think of it?

There’s something about publishing that makes our work feel real and worthwhile that keeping it in a drawer can never do. This is completely natural and even understandable, and it’s nice that we have the option, but we should also recognize the freedom of writing for ourselves from time to time without the need for criticism and judgment.

I published dozens of essays and stories on Medium before I ever tried to submit them to publications. I had countless blogs and websites before that. I wrote letters and scribbled in journals. I even shared them with people occasionally. I think it’s healthy, and even necessary, to think of our creative output in a variety of ways.

There are things we write for ourselves and things we write for others, and possibly even quite a lot in between. The difficulty is that too often we believe that the things we write for others are somehow more important than the things we write for ourselves.

This is not true.

I see too many would-be writers who falsely believe there is no value in what they have to say unless some outside force validates it as worthy and good. This is counterproductive to becoming a writer because you’re not allowing yourself space to grow. Learning how to write is not just a product of choosing the right words to convey the thoughts in your head. It is discovering the ability to sit down and write every day without first being inspired to do so. Once you have written enough, it will have value, and someone will want to publish it.

The job of a writer is to write, not to publish.

I was watching an interview with the writer and actor Bob Odenkirk the other day, and he was talking about how he handles inappropriate fan behavior in the wild. He might be in the middle of a conversation, and someone will ask him for a photo or an autograph, and he has to explain that he’s in the middle of a conversation and can’t do it. He’s polite but firm, telling them that while he appreciates their fandom, he can’t give them what they want because he’s busy doing something else. He found that keeping it simple and honest was the best approach.

I will try and remember to do the same.

Criticism Writing