Arctic Light

My very favorite thing from the now-widely-publicized news about Sarah Palin resigning as governor -- THANK GOD -- is this classic quote from her resignation speech: “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.” (See paragraph 5.) You just cannot make stuff like this up.

Anyway! A long time ago, I had a "disambiguation" thread (word shamelessly snurched from Wikipedia) for people to ask questions about my fic. I haven't done that in quite awhile, though. So ... do you have any questions about any of my stories? A reference you didn't get? A bit of characterization that seemed kind of "off"? A plot point that seemed like an homage to something famous, but may not have been? Or are you just curious why I made a particular story decision? Critical questions are fine; I wouldn't have opened up the floor if I wasn't willing to field criticism.

Ask away!

Snurched from kristen999 -- ask me for my "top five" list of anything you like, and I'll list my top five of that thing or things.

(With the caveat that if you ask me for my top five somethings on two different days, you'll probably get two different answers. *g*)

So I'm tossing a question out there for the writer types. I'm sure this happens to most of us at some point. Your friend gives you a short story she wrote and asks what you honestly think -- and the main character is a gigantic Mary Sue. You read a fanfic by an author whose last story you really liked -- but this one has an ending you absolutely hate, that makes you think, "So&So would NEVER do that in canon!"

I'm not so much talking about minor grammatical mistakes; those are relatively simple to point out or ignore. I'm thinking more of big systemic problems with the story, things that taint the whole work and make you reluctant to try something else by that author. Things that make you think, "You know, this person should really be made aware of this, so that she can improve next time." Maybe the author seems to have a problem dealing fairly with a certain kind of character (e.g. can't do male characters, or seems to have a problem with people of faith or atheists); maybe she has massive plot problems in all her stories; maybe every paragraph she writes is only one sentence long. But you think her stories have promise; it's just that something about them is badly flawed.

As a writer, do you *want* to hear something like that, or not? Does it matter how it's worded -- is it easier to take if it's phrased as "The way I understand this character in canon, she wouldn't..." rather than "This character is totally OOC and she would never cheat on her husband like that!" Would you like to be asked first, and have the option of saying, "No, I don't want concrit" rather than getting it unsolicited -- or is the question itself offensive? Does it matter if it's someone you know vs. a stranger? Is public concrit (e.g. in an LJ comment or review) less acceptible than private concrit in an email?

I'm just curious about how other people approach this. For my own part, I really do want to be a professional someday, so if I'm making mistakes in my stories -- or things that my readers perceive as mistakes, even if I myself disagree -- I would like to hear about it, even if it's harsh and hurts my feelings a little. But I'm not sure if that's a rare opinion in fandom. I can understand that, if someone is writing strictly for fun and fandom is their escape from real life, then getting a 10-paragraph critique of a story would be rather unpleasant.

What do you all think?