The Pain of Insults

It amazes me how things are timed in life.

My husband and I have been talking a lot about our coming little one; what she will be like, what we will need to teach her, stuff like that. Today, our discussion revolved around hopes for her personality. Both Ed and I had many run-ins with nasty little children when we were young and his dearest hope is that our daughter does not turn out to be one of those nasty children- the kind that are mean on purpose and find joy in the suffering of others. We talked about it at great length- about possible reasons behind the behavior of those children and how to avoid that and about ways of teaching a child what it means to be kind and loving. I have fewer fears than my husband, as usual, but I don't want to assume that because we are loving, our daughter will be.

Than I went online to check my email. This is where the timing comes in. I entered a writing contest a few months ago and wrote my first sci/fi/fantasy short story. It was a good effort and I was mostly looking for the two critiques by published authors that would be given to every entrant. I got them today.

Points were out of 5.

The first author gave me a 4.2! "Pretty good for my first time," I thought! The comments were "Well written with a few grammatical errors. Easy to follow story lines. The ending was drawn out too far. A little more character development would have been appreciated. A shorter conclusion would have given it a very nice 'Twilight Zone' feel. With a little work this could be an excellent piece of writing."

Alright then! I was pretty happy with that. The author gave me some specific feedback, no personal comments, and something to shoot for. Great!

Then I read the second critique. At first, I wondered if they had read the same piece. But they had. Some of the more painful statements were:

"This story is a delirious, wandering, nonsensical piece."

"I just did not get it."

"The writing is too colloquial, scattered, and without narrative voice."

"It feels like I'm listening to a word salad from a crazy person."

"Makes no sense at all."

"If the plot was meant to be insanity, then it succeeds. Otherwise, the plot does not function."

Now, some people would be horribly hurt by this- and I probably would have been if I had a deep attachment to the specific work (I have yet to enter any of my true loves into contests for fear of this kind of critique- I usually start from scratch and see what pops up) or even if I had not read the other critique first, which helped soften the blow. What I did do, was laugh through the entire critique. I laughed partly because it sounded ridiculous to me- the author said my story made no sense and I sounded like a crazy person! That is so specific and gives me real points to work on! (I'm still laughing a little). But I laughed also because the author seemed to be trying to be extra mean, for reasons known only to him/her.

I can just see some smug person who has been published, looking down his/her nose at some amateur entrant in a short story contest and thinking about how to crush them. Or perhaps his/her motives are more to prepare that naive person for the realities of publisher critiques or reader critiques. That may be giving him/her too much credit, but I can see how someone might think that way. In either case, the critique was not useful to me in any way. There was nothing for me to work on and the comments seemed written specifically to injure. How am I supposed to take the score of 1 our of 5 he/she gave me seriously?

This hasn't deterred me from future entries. I can take a punch. I just wish the punch were more specific and less mean. I'm wondering if this person was one of those nasty kids... I may never know.