Not a writing question but one I'm curious about.... I knwo you don't do free critiques for understandable reasons but what about paid ones? Short ones, like with a word limit or other restrictions. Id be really curious to give you a blurb from a story and see what you can do with it.
I’ve considered doing this, especially for small things as opposed to entire stories, but seriously critiquing strangers on the internet doesn’t tend to work too well in practice. I don’t mean that like “oh no, strangers!” but rather that for a critique to be truly useful it has to be personalized.Â
You have to take into account things like:
- Age and maturity. I’m sure as hell not talking to a 13 year old about their writing the same way I’d talk to a 40 year old. (In all fairness, I doubt I’d get a 13 year old paying me to look at their stuff but the idea still stands.) Maturity isn’t exactly the same as age, but they correlate enough that I’d really need to know who I’m talking to.
- Writing experience. Would you critique a 10th grader with barely 3 years of casual writing experience the same way as grad student studying English? I sure hope not. Years of writing aren’t always telltale of where someone should be anyway because there are different levels of immersion and natural talent.
- Self confidence. You can only be truly honest with the people who have the confidence to take it. Yes, there are good and bad ways to phrase things, but in the end if something’s very wrong with a piece of work (and you’re paying me) then I’m going to point it out and not hide in paragraphs of “oh no but it’s fine”. Beating around the bush takes way too much time and I’m not going to lie because I’m here to make you a better writer.
- Goals. For a critique to be truly useful, you need to know the writer’s goals for the piece. There’s no such thing as perfect writing and a good critic knows where to draw the line between “this could be better, but it works” and “change this–now”. That line comes from the writer’s goals.
- My own time, skillset, and interests. I’m not a professional editor and my career doesn’t help make up for that. I’d have to set some rules on what I’m here to help with and what lines I don’t cross. For example, I hate grammar editing. I don’t know why. I think I did it too much back in school when I was working as a tutor. That said, there’s a difference between me pointing out that someone constantly makes this specific mistake vs them wanting me to find every single instance and fix it for them. The latter is a hell no.
Ultimately if I ever decided to take up the mantle then I’d have to have some kind of “get to know you” form so I don’t accidentally treat a newbie like someone who’s been writing for that newbie’s entire lifetime. The underlying issue with that is it would all be self-reported and most people are actually really bad at self-reporting. It’s not their fault; personal experience is what shapes perceived boundaries and you can only judge yourself within those boundaries. A “mature” teenager may be mature for their specific age but that doesn’t actually mean they’re where a mature adult would be. Life experience is what moves those perceived boundaries and you can’t substitute that. Big difference in treatment of writing skills and I’d hate to hurt someone who wasn’t ready to hear something.
Maybe. Still maybe. I could see myself doing it with a word count limit and a “Get to Know the Writer” form. The blurb idea is actually quite good– something like a “teaser scene” that published authors often put out, but writing/choosing those scenes is actually harder than it seems. You have to take into account that the reader knows nothing and you’re dropping them into into the middle of a story, balance of info vs scene, does it sound cheesy without the rest of the book’s flow?
Maybe I could do a first chapter thing? Eh…. It’s a cool idea to consider.
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