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UNSOLICITED CRITICISM - a thread: the most helpful criticism you can get is from people who understand what you want to achieve with your creative piece and work to help you realise that. Strangers in comments sections offering their thoughts are woefully unequipped for this. https://twitter.com/The_RPM_/status/1302679547985498112">https://twitter.com/The_RPM_/...
This is especially the case when they lack the wider context of a given piece, and do not know its place in a wider work. For the tamest example, I posted this on YouTube the other day - I had written it that day.
One commenter suggested I change "purple" to "violet" not knowing that purple here is referring to a set of fairy lights not mentioned in this specific passage, but in the scene around it, and that the word purple came from the characters, who would not use the term "violet".
Another suggested I change from passive to active voice, which again, misses the point - the scene features someone dissociating, and the choice to make the prose passive rather than active removes her sense of agency, which fits the dissociated feel I was going for.
Putting aside how unequipped people often are when they don& #39;t know what they& #39;re trying to achieve, criticism is only helpful when the artist trusts the source of criticism - their skills, opinions, and credentials. Nobody is inclined to trust a stranger commenter.
This is why we seek out beta readers, or criticism on specific parts that we want to make better, given that oftentimes, with art being so subjective, a random person& #39;s dislike is more taste than objective fact.
The question here is not whether things publicly posted should be open for criticism. On a meta-political free speech level, they absolutely are, and no art is immune. The question is about how we can most helpfully critique, and whether our thoughts at any given time are helpful
This is all made worse by the internet. I am criticised constantly, every single day online, and constant criticism, whether kindly meant or malicious, wears you down, demoralises you, and makes you hate whatever you work on. It is not fun.
Neither of those criticisms I mentioned before really annoy me though. It& #39;s ones like someone taking my passage, rewriting it in their own style, saying they think it& #39;s better, and then telling OTHERS in their comments to go check out their rewrite.
This is as well as comments which as simply negative, aggressively phrased in a way only the anonymity of the internet providers - often with no justification.
All this means that most unsolicited criticism online either (a) misses your intention (b) comes from a source you don& #39;t trust or (c) is in bad faith, and makes you feel crap. It all leads you to be jaded of all unsolicited criticism, willfully or not.
And let& #39;s not forget the basis of all this: it& #39;s unsolicited. It wasn& #39;t asked for, and it& #39;s as rude to share unwanted thoughts online as it is in real life. Artists will OFTEN get advice and critique from helpful sources to improve, and are most often very aware of their flaws.
Sometimes artists just want to share a thing they& #39;re proud of without getting comments from strangers telling them how to do it better, and there should be space for them to do that.
