Tuesday, January 01, 2008

I'm no better critiquer than I am a writer

I try to do one new thing on the first day of the new year. I went to a meeting of a science fiction writers' critique group. One of my SF writer friends had said that the critique delivered by this group is so mild as to be useless: they'll never tell you if your story sucks. But I wanted to see for myself. Well, they didn't trash anyone's story, but they pointed out a lot of things in it that I thought were very helpful to the author. I felt a bit useless without having to offer any helpful critique to the authors, as I'm really not that perceptive. I'm blind to literary style, and I'm not bothered by stuff like frequent shifts of POV, and such. The only critique I can offer is "can you make it a little bit more interesting?", which of course is not helpful. :-) (I didn't bring any of my stuff to be critiqued -- maybe I will someday, but this was my exploratory meeting.)

And I am totally not equipped to critique vampire erotica. I have no idea what distinguishes a good story in this genre from a bad one. :-)

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