Writing Advice from the Inexperienced

Circa 2016, I joined an online writing group. The idea was we'd take turns reading and critiquing each other's work, and help each other grow as authors. This is not what happened in my case.

At this point, I was trying to write more often, after a lifetime of sporadic fiction writing. In addition to my completed yet still novice manuscript, I was working on one short story after another. I wanted to get better, but for that to happen, I needed fresh eyes on my work.

This writing group was not it. While I occasionally got useful feedback, few were equipped to help me. Years of intense reading and hours down the TV Tropes rabbit hole gave me many ideas of how stories worked. I may not have had much experience, but I was at least working at a Fiction 102 level.

Most people who gave me feedback were working at a Fiction 101 level. They knew one type of story structure, and how dare I write in other styles? Much of this feedback had to do with plot, and my apparent lack of it. According to them, a story needs plot in order to qualify as a story.

One explanation I got about plot was "Plot isn't 'The king dies, then the queen dies,' it's 'The king dies, then the queen dies of grief.'"

I still don't know what that person was trying to get at. They must have though their blurbs were self evident, as they didn't specify what the difference between those statements are.

The clearest explanation the group gave regarding plot was "A person wants a thing, gets a thing, and has a thing." The allegedly plotless story they complained about had that exact storyline. To say nothing of stories where loss, stagnation, or character study are driving forces.

Likewise, conflict was super important, and I'm not sure why. My idea of storytelling is throwing two or more people into the same room and seeing what happens. Or diving into somebody's head. According to this group, conflict isn't a force that helps fuel the story, but something they couldn't define. One person complained a story of mine, about a girl's internal battle, had no conflict.

To be fair, my feedback likely wasn't much better. I didn't have enough writing experience at the time to really evaluate other's work, and this was well before I became an editor. From what I remember, my advice tended to be more character based, some fact checking, and encouraging more gender diversity in their work.

I have other stories about this group and how my work didn't mesh with their ideas of Real Fiction. I'll share in other posts.

Perplexing feedback