I’m mid twenties, so younger than the others here, but I just wanted to add — I went to college for creative writing, and was required to take both editing and general workshop classes (which were taught by published authors, so people who had gone through this process professionally themselves) where I was also taught how to give criticism, and what anon is describing is not what I was taught. What the reblogs are describing is much much more in line with my experience. You can be honest with your criticism without being brutal. Making people feel bad about their writing is not going to encourage them to keep trying to get better. My professors emphasized this a lot in my workshop classes, and made it clear that they would step in if they thought things were getting too aggressive or cruel. That never actually had to happen in my classes, I think because everyone there was getting workshopped at some point and knew how anxiety inducing it was to put yourself on display like that, so we all had a mutual respect and care for each other during critiques.
In workshop we were taught to detail what worked for us as a reader vs what didn’t (or what wasn’t clear, or what took us out of the story, etc), not what was “right” vs “wrong” or “good” vs “bad.” Creative writing is an art form, and art is inherently subjective — there were times in workshop where I would critique something that one of my fellow students really liked and felt worked, or vice versa. Sometimes we’d suggest something be cut, only for the author to explain their intentions which would change the conversation to okay, how do we help them work that in better? The professors also always made it clear that the student being workshopped was not required to implement everything being suggested. The main point of workshop was to help the author see their work from the perspective of their reader, which in turn could help tailor their edits moving forward. However, sometimes that’s not what their goals for the piece were. Sometimes it is just a stylistic choice that they prefer, and that is their right. It doesn’t make the piece inherently bad - you personally just might not be the target audience for it.
And even with copy editing, which I think is more in line with what anon was describing, where you’re focusing more on grammar and phrasing and the “little things”: your goal is still to preserve the author’s intentions and narrative voice as best as you can. And again, the author doesn’t have to use your edits. I can flag something as clunky and suggest a rewrite, and they don’t have to make that change if they feel it serves the intended purpose as is. That’s not necessarily insecurity or a refusal to improve, that is them making a stylistic choice that they feel suits their piece better. At the end of the day, they are going to know their piece better than you, and it is going to mean more to them than it does to you, and the author-editor relationship only works if you respect that (just as they respect you enough to seek and hear out your critiques and understand that it’s not personal).
On that note, some of the experiences anon seems to be drawing from appear to be very academia-focused, and I think that’s an important distinction to make because editing for academic writing is very, very different than editing for creative writing. In academia, the rules do matter a lot more. You’re writing for a different audience, and the focus is much more on the material/content rather than a unique voice/writing style. The goal is to become invisible as a writer to avoid distracting from the content (I was taught that you shouldn’t use first or second person at all in academia for this reason). Stylistic flourishes and grammatical rule breaking aren’t going to fit. That is what a high school teacher sending an essay back covered in red marks is going to be looking at. In creative writing, you typically want your voice to stand out more and leave an impression. You’re trying to paint a picture and evoke emotions and inspire reactions rather than presenting and analyzing information. It gives you a lot more stylistic freedom, and that’s something you take into account when editing.
And then on top of that, as a final note, fandom and fanfic is not professional writing, creative or otherwise. It something that is done for free and for fun, and there are many times that the target audience for a fic is one singular person: the person who wrote it. Not everyone wants to be a writer outside of fanfic, not everyone is training to become less sensitive to rejection - a good many authors are just playing with characters and ideas for the fun of it. That is also something to be taken into account when editing. I have a friend who beta reads my fics for me, and what I’m looking for in those interactions is basically to find out if what I’m saying makes sense, and if she has the intended reaction to it. It is much, much less in depth than what I would expect from a full workshop on one of my pieces, or from someone copy editing them. Again, that’s not me being insecure or not wanting to improve as a writer, that is me not wanting a fixation on “honing my craft” to take over what is essentially my playtime. There are other times where I’m focused on improvement (and I do feel that improvement happens with everything you write on some level), but that’s not my goal with fanfic.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what an author is looking for in a beta/editor — there isn’t a one-size-fits-all. Some people do seek out brutality without emotion in their betas/editors, and if it works for them, that’s great! But that’s not the standard, and it’s not something that’s going to help most people.
