#Writers critique groups

[crowlore]

i remember it used to be a bit of a fandom pet peeve of mine that some people would forget that the gung ho guns and eye of michael were two separate groups with some membership overlap but then stampede came along and made the eom into a project of conrad’s backed by knives. another example of how the reboot feels like bad fanfiction.

[pagerunner-j]

Recently I saw a meme going around (that I didn't actually participate in because no one ever humors me with those things) that asked, among other questions, if you've ever written anything in collaboration with somebody else.

I keep thinking about that question, because my answer is yes, but here's how that went.

The writing itself, exchanging new sections, egging each other on, etc. was fun. Genuinely was.

Less fun: everything else.

Everything else included:

someone sending fanart to my cowriter, and not me

the time I asked said fanartist if she could draw something from a scene I wrote, and getting told she didn't have time

people corresponding with my cowriter about the story, and not me

my cowriter agreeing to some rando's plan about something they wanted to do with the story, without even mentioning this to me, and suddenly the rando was emailing me asking me to do things for her, and I had no idea what the fuck was happening

someone interviewing us about the story (kinda nifty) and then choosing multiple quotes to add to the article that were...entirely written by my cowriter

my cowriter claiming she didn't even notice

I think you're getting the gist.

In not entirely unrelated news, I haven't collaborated with anyone since, and I don't use that pen name anymore.

Stay tuned for: why I haven't had a beta reader in years.

(Don't actually stay tuned; it's not that long a story. It's mostly that people continually flake out, leave me hanging for weeks at best and months at worst, and then it's usually some variety of "uh, it was really good," which, well...what the fuck do I do with that?)

[despazito]

God I miss being in a writer's room environment, I really don't like writing/boarding solo I love having several like-minded creatives together throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. All my favourite ideas come out of manic workshopping sessions I want to have that again 😔

[luma-az]

Le vortex

Défi d’écriture 30 jours pour écrire, 13 août 

Thème : tourbillons/la lumière sous la porte

. .

Le mage récite l’incantation, lentement, avec le soin extrême que sa profession réserve aux mots de pouvoir. Et ça marche. Un tourbillon commence à se former devant lui, d’un bleu lumineux qui semble tout sauf naturel, et qui s’agrandit à chaque mot – rapidement rejoint par un autre tourbillon, à l’intérieur, tournant en sens contraire, d’une lumière plus verte. Viennent ensuite deux tourbillons perpendiculaires aux deux premiers et de couleurs différentes, donnant une forme de sphère au sort, puis d’autres, de plus en plus, dans tous les sens, de toutes les couleurs, qui s’entourent et s’entremêlent sans jamais se couper la route. Le spectacle est à la fois à couper le souffle et à donner mal au coeur. Ça tangue fort, mais sans bouger.

Pendant que le paladin se détourne pour vomir son déjeuner – la barbare se moque de lui, évidemment – le mage termine son incantation. Reprennant sa voix normale, il dit d’un ton beaucoup trop joyeux :

« Parfait ! Il a l’air stable, on peut y aller !

— Attend, demande la barde qui le connaît bien. Comment ça, il y a « l’air » stable ? Il est stable ou il est pas stable ?

— Il est stable, ne t’en fais pas.

— Tu es sûr ? Comment tu peux voir ça ?

— Ecoute, c’est comme quand tu vois de la lumière sous la porte et que tu en déduis que de l’autre coté de la porte, la pièce est éclairée. Les tourbillons tourbillonnent impeccablement, donc il est forcément stable. Sinon ils se rentreraient dedans.

— Mais tu ne veux pas le tester d’abord ? On pourrait invoquer un petit animal et voir ce que ça donne.

— On n’a pas le temps ! Ce vortex ne va pas rester ouvert mille ans, et j’ai mis des plombes pour mettre la main sur cette formule ! Allez, viens !

La barde regarde rapidement le reste de l’équipe. Ils sont prêts, leur équipement à la main, et ne se posent pas plus de questions que ça.

— Bon, ok, ok…

Le mage lui fait un grand sourire de victoire, aussi elle ajoute :

— Mais tu passes en premier. »

.

.

[lordsardine]

.

[bombshellsandbluebells]

now that I’m dragging my mental health back to a semi-decent place and feel like I might have the energy to like....write literally anything again, at some point I’m going to write about the importance of critiquing within the context of a written story

as in, critiquing narrative points completely without any consideration of how they are contextualized in the story is a bit unfair.

as in, I continue to see things about the Ted Lasso finale that annoy me. not because people had a different read of the finale or disliked different things than I did - or that they’re critiquing it at all; there’s plenty I will critique or would have done differently - but like, saying things like “Ted going back home to Kansas is bad because he’s clearly miserable about it” is an unfair reading when, within the CONTEXT of the story, it’s not framed that way. regardless of whether it was a choice you liked or how you would have wanted things to end, it’s not framed in the story as a) a bad thing, b) a miserable sacrifice, or c) a thing that Ted is upset about. so there’s a difference between saying “I don’t like Ted going back home to Kansas at the end because to me that doesn’t read as a happy ending’ and “the finale objectively frames Ted going back as a bad thing because it makes him unhappy” 

and this isn’t JUST a critique on criticism in regards to Ted Lasso. it’s the nature of fandom criticism in general. “I didn’t like this thing” becoming “this thing is objectively bad in the story” or even “this thing is portrayed as objectively bad bc of this, this, and this” despite that contradicting how the story actually frames it.

[kdsmiththewriter]

What I really mean when I submit my work to my critique group!

[sureuncertainty]

i want an in-person writing critique group who will actually read my writing and engage with me on a regular basis about it and who will actually write stuff of their own for me to read and critique and engage with THEM about instead of just talking about their ideas and not actually writing anything and then not reading the pages i send them and never being free to actually meet up BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FIND THESE PEOPLE

[jolenes-book-journey]

FWA- Clay County Florida Style

FWA- Clay County Florida Style – The Florida Writers Association is a state-wide organization that encourages writers to help writers. They have the main website at https://www.floridawriters.org/ which has the Royal Palm Awards, supports local chapters in each county, a podcast and much more. They offer various membership levels with different fees attached. It is always a great idea to join…

[sighitsfine]

Are you writing a queer fantasy novel and want a writing buddy to talk to about it? Please DM me!! I’d love to talk about writing, and I have a queer fantasy novel in the works too!

[novlr]

https://novlr.org/the-reading-room/how-finding-a-writing-community-can-support-your-goals/

[ellistocracy]

the problem with getting sensitivity readers is that it's a job and you have to pay them. which is fair but i don't have any money and it's highly doubtful that I'm going to make any

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[katherine-traylor]

For the second time in the last few years, I'm working with a critique partner who's very strict and picky about other people's work, but who gets defensive and sullen if anyone criticizes theirs. (We're nice, too: this person's critiques of others are way stronger than the ones they receive themself.) I feel like it must be a lack of self-awareness that causes this: they don't understand how they're coming across, and they're also not able to see the flaws in their own work. It's tiring to deal with.

[lordsardine]

.