From F&F for Books:- JohnColgrove said:

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Once again thank you for the criticism, I've never gotten any constructive (or even destructive) criticism before so I appreciate this.

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If you want to be a writer, you have to accept the facts that 1) you are writing for an audience and 2) if a specialised audience of wouldbe authors read your story wrong, then how would it be considered by the cynical beast they call an editor? Yes, people sometimes do create perfunctory critiques at critters - the requirement of one per week, a 200 word minimum and a bonus for doing 10 critiques does encourage short critiques, but I found that others do put some real thought into it. Besides, if they choose your story to do a critique, then that is a win by itself.

I did critters a few years ago, and it is one of about three or four sites that I would really recommend - especially for first time authors. I got some good feedback there. But I found the feedback here a bit tougher and better for that. I did one story through critters that got almost universal praise from over 20 respondants, including by a person that is now an editor. I then later brought it to here, and got mostly strong criticism (and no praise). I still don't know what to do with the story. (OK, so I've now got 3 rejections for it - that's authorial life.)

Part of writing is figuring out who to ask for feedback from. Lately I've moved to an almost exclusively non-writing readers group, as I've been able to get faster and more useful ("this character would never do X!" or "I got lost here, who is so-and-so again?") feedback from them than from writers, and the best part? I don't have to feel indebted to them to offer up my critting time in return (my critting time eats into my very limited writing time, so I have become a bit stingy about it.)

That said, there's a TON to learn from critiquing others' work, so I do try to do crits here and there (particularly here in F&F) - but I've moved away from that being a big part of my writing time.

Sometimes there's that one reader who just doesn't get what you're trying to do or seems to take some odd pleasure in smacking down other people's work. It can be hard, but it can also be necessary to look beyond their feedback. If you hear their feedback and it is pointing out things about your work that have been nagging at you, that's one thing, but if they're just complaining or nitpicking or picking out things that you don't feel are problems, move on, thank them for their time, and ignore anything but that which helps you get better. (Most important point: Don't argue it out with them. It eats up writing energy. Arguing about your work is a great way to make you conflicted about even working on it anymore!)

I've been a dedicated reader for one novel-length story, and that was a fantastic experience for me. From her response, the author appreciated it too.

The problem with critters is that they have a formula that doesn't work very well. You're supposed to critique about one thing a week on average, and every three months or so you get to have a piece float to the top of the queue. On the writing side, that's an awful long time to go without feedback. On the critique side, that's a hell of a lot of work to do if you take criticism seriously.

The problem with the formula is that it's so easy to cheat that it almost isn't cheating at all. You simply find a relatively short piece each week and dash off a quick, not very thoughtful critique. The critiques must be a certain minimum number of characters, and the software detects too much quoting, but it can't detect what writers really need: attentive and thoughtful criticism. I watched this for some months and there was a considerable bias towards the shortest manuscripts in terms of the number of critiques.

There's even a prize you get for submitting the *largest* number of critiques in a week. That makes the problem worse, in my opinion. A single critique can take *all* the time I have available in a week for criticism. And oh! Some of the pieces in critters are mind-bendingly bad. It's quite tempting to say, "this piece is lousy, I wish I could tell you why but that takes more time than I'm willing to devote to you."

But this gets to the really useful thing about critters. Critters is *much* more valuable for honing your critiquing skills than submitting work for critique. I'd go so far to say as it is next to useless if you are looking for help with story, but if you put the work into constructive critique, even of really horrible manuscripts, you'll learn a lot.

I belong to critters and have for maybe four years. I don't worry about "idiots" touching my stories because you can find them on most writing sites. Notice I said most, this site is one not included. But you can also find people who know what they are doing. Like a in-person writing circle.

I no longer send in stories though because of how long it takes even though Burt has speeded that up somewhat, and because it wasn't working for me. I sent in a few stories three times and they won't ant closer than to being bought than when I revised them on my own. But obviously it does work for some people. I stayed with them because I like doing crits- I am doing one novel now- and because I thought sending in a certain novel of my own would help me find the nitpicks that I always have a bunch of. But I got busy with other things and sent in only the prologue and two chapters so far.

It depends on what you want and how long you can wait for crits. As I said it works for some people. As far as I know I never received a crit from a pro. They now have a private forum to discuss each story you crit but I can't get on it so even though that could be interesting, it doesn't do me any good. I wonder if they are using the same forum site as WotF used to use and The Official Jim Butcher site still does. I can't get on that forum either.

However, I suppose it could be abused as well, with people only giving their friends crit bucks, or people only giving crit bucks to those people who said nice (and not very useful) things about their stories.

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there should be "crit bucks"

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CC has something like a 'crit bucks' system, they just call it credits. The only difference from your idea is the credits received for critique and the credits spent to put a story up for critique is not controlled by the author, but by the system itself.

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The problem with critters is that they have a formula that doesn't work very well. You're supposed to critique about one thing a week on average, and every three months or so you get to have a piece float to the top of the queue. On the writing side, that's an awful long time to go without feedback. On the critique side, that's a hell of a lot of work to do if you take criticism seriously.

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That is a terrible ratio. Once again I must tout critique circle with some statistics from my account there. I've been a member since August 23rd of 2010. Since then I've critiqued 33 works for other members, earning enough credits to have received 13 critiques in under 5 months. That comes out to about one and a half critiques given per week, and a critique of my own received every other week. On average, I get about 3-4 critiques from different members, though this has been going up as I develop a reputation in the community (people will critique your work if they see you have a lot of critiques in the hope of getting a quality critique of their own work).

KayTi touched upon the notion that one might wish to select who can or can't critique their work. CC gives you two or three options for this. The first option is that you can restrict critiques to a work you've put in the queue to various levels of experience (for example, I now restrict my work to those who've critiqued at least 10 stories).

Another option (but this does not come with the free account) is you can set up private queues and invite only the people you want critiques from to it. The nice thing about private queues is you can make them creditless if you want, and since its your queue, you can set it up so stories can be up there indefinitely if you want.

Lastly, I think you can ban people from critiquing your work if you want to. I've never had to go that route, I think since critiquers know they will be rated by the author, they generally try to do their best.

In short, they have a well thought out system where reward is equitably correlated with effort, and the critiquer is encouraged to give their best effort. It isn't perfect, but it is by far the best I've seen. My only major gripe is their credit scale generally encourages shorter work, so if you write longish stories like I do, you have to break them up into two or three parts so it will take longer to get a full critique there.

A basic account there is free, so its worth giving it a shot if you are looking for an online workshop.

I'm also a member of the SFF Online Workshop, which focuses solely on SFF. They run a similar credit system, but it is otherwise less technically sophisticated and seems to be less active than CC. Still, some nice folks there on their, and I know Aliette de Bodard and several other known others participate there. Haven't been there that long, and have yet to submit anything for critique there, so I can't say much about that experience yet.

Maybe I shouldn't be thanking you, this means I have more crits to do... Darnit! No, I really am glad. Seems like you can do crits on your own schedule instead of feeling pressured to just submit whatever by the deadline.

Just so you know, the public queues do actually have a deadline, if you look in the queue title bar it tells you the timespan that the stories listed will be in the queue.

Private queues, on the other hand, don't necessarily have a deadline.

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At some point in the future, if we wanted, we might be interested in setting up a private queue for Hatrack members. We could visit that idea if enough people were interested.

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One of these days I need to check out more fully CC. It does sound like a good site, and I need all the help I can get.