Writing Advice: Accepting Critique, Part 2
Last month I responded to a question about accepting critique. In the intervening time I’ve begun reading a book called Craft in the Real World, with an eye to improving our RAWR workshop, and even a short way into this book, it’s given me more thoughts about critique. So let’s talk about culture and audience.
I don’t think I need to define those terms, but briefly, for the purposes of this blog: culture is, roughly, the set of symbols, values and traditions that a group of people share, which at least in part defines their identity. Audience is the people who are going to read your story (intended audience is the people you write your story for).
If all of your stories are written with an intended audience of other people who share your culture, and are only critiqued by other people who share your culture, then these concepts will generally be invisible to you through the writing process. If you are writing furry fiction for a furry audience, critiqued by your fellow furry writers, then you won’t encounter critiques from people confused by why the fox doesn’t want to kill and eat the rabbit. You won’t have to explain your culture to your readers or justify it to your critiquers. But if you want your furry fiction to have reach outside the community, then you will have to think about how you represent and explain elements that seem obvious to you, and critiques from non-furry writers will be very helpful to you.
Here are a couple examples from my own experience:
A friend, years ago, had written a story with a gay main character and asked me to read it to see whether it felt right (my first sensitivity read—and a note throughout the following: the story was very well written and I did not then have the vocabulary to express the problem I felt, which I regret). I thought that the events portrayed weren’t really in line with the kinds of stories that gay culture wanted to read (not like I was a big expert on non-furry gay fiction, but I listened to Dan Savage and have lots of gay friends). The friend told me that the events were basically true, that the story was based on a real event. But believability wasn’t the problem; the problem was the way the event was presented. A matter-of-fact story about a gay man changing his identity in order to be close to his crush wasn’t (I thought) what other gay people wanted to read at the time. You could tell that same story but derive a different lesson from it; for example, from the perspective of the same character but older, talking about how he grew out of that phase. Identity and being able to live our identity is a central part of gay culture, and the history of having to cover up that identity is also a well-known part of it. The story was well-crafted and I think would have been right a few decades earlier, but the culture had moved on and the story needed to acknowledge that if it was intended for a gay audience.
You may have read that last sentence and thought, “but what if it wasn’t?” Good catch. We’ll come back to that.
The second example is a furry story I read by a non-furry writer. While the story was well crafted, it spent a good deal of time explaining that furries originated as artificially created sex toys. By this time, I’d read a dozen or more stories with that premise. Furry fiction had, in general, moved on from the origin story and into the realm of what furries would do once they existed. As I write this, I think it might be indicative of a shift in the mindset of the furry community from justifying our existence to living our identity, but that’s something for another time. It is interesting to posit that, though, because it speaks to the role fiction plays in a culture. Fiction both shapes and reflects culture, and fiction that is out of step with the culture feels off somehow. Furry culture is cool in that it’s so broad and expansive that we always welcome new exploration, but I do think that rehashing origin stories—looking backwards—is one sense in which we feel like that’s been done.
In both the above examples, someone was presenting their culture’s view of a different culture. In the case of the furry story, the writer might not even have been aware that there was a furry culture (there definitely is). The critiques in those cases are not about the technical writing of the story, but about how the culture the story is about is being addressed. In the case of the furry story, there’s nothing wrong with a good origin story, of course. The critique in this case was that that particular story had been told many times over in the community and this story wasn’t adding anything new to it. And, in a more general sense, the community had moved on from being interested in that kind of story.
But what about that whole audience thing? Those critiques are valid if the story is being read by the gay or furry cultures, but what if the audience is someone else?
This is where we get into a lot of the problematic areas where words like “appropriation” come up. Furry is such a wide-ranging culture with so many variations among sub-communities that it’s difficult to come up with an example (what if everyone started wearing animal tails? awesome!), but something close is that infamous CSI episode. They wrote about furry culture for a non-furry audience, and the result was something sort of recognizable as a furry convention if you squint. A furry was involved in the production, but according to WikiFur, their critique was ultimately dismissed by the show’s director. So someone from outside the culture wrote about the culture for an audience outside the culture, and the result was a skewed, largely misleading portrayal that ended up contributing to a negative (or at least over-sexualized, and I say this as an author of adult books) image of the furry community.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Another example, with much more harmful consequences, is how vodou was misrepresented in the white media of New Orleans in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The image of frenzied dancers, blood sacrifices, and orgies that was perpetuated—sometimes deliberately with the aim of reducing the power of local Black people—led to laws being passed, incarceration, seizing of property, and death for many practitioners of vodou (and as an excuse to do the same to others).
All of this is to say that when your story is being critiqued—or when you are critiquing—you should be thinking about the culture the story comes from and the audience it’s meant for. It’s often hard to sort out details are culture-specific, and that’s a conversation you can have with your writing group. When in doubt, ask more people.
If you are writing about a culture you’re not familiar with, it behooves you to hire a specialized critiquer, a sensitivity reader, whose job is to review stories from outside their culture for common misperceptions. Getting these critiques can be difficult and can make you feel very much like an outsider bumbling their way through a strange land. That’s fine! Sensitivity readers should be teachers and guides, explaining to you why a certain element doesn’t work with their culture, and the proper way to accept that critique is as a student. Learn what they have to tell you and improve your story as a result.
In this age, it is harder and harder to control your audience. Imagine if someone published a story about furries in The Atlantic. That’s not exactly aimed at the furry community, right? But within a day or two, thousands of furries would have found out about that story and read it. Similarly, you can’t ever be sure that some person or group will never read your story. Critique is the way we find out what other people think of our work, in grammar, style, and culture, and the way we make our work better is to listen to what they have to say. So as I concluded last month, the way to receive critique of any kind is with a gracious “thank you” and a sincere desire to use that critique to improve your story.