User blog:ToaAuserv/A Modest Proposal

(Somehow this is the first blog entry I've ever made here???)

So I've been talking to some people and I've been thinking. I've never been the most active member of this wiki (though I've been a part of the community for years, just, not the wiki itself), but one of my favorite things about it is that people can post their writing. Much has been said about the value or lack thereof in writing fan fiction, but I'm of the opinion that it's a great way to develop your creative writing abilities and perhaps, if one is interested, to prepare for writing more serious works later on. Like the kind you make money off of. BUT, just writing into a void doesn't help you get better. The key to improvement is, frankly, to show your stuff to writers who are better than you (either at one particular aspect of writing or just in general) so they can identify what kinds of mistakes you tend to make and tell you how to be better. This is how I've improved, and how I continue to improve, and it's what I think is the only real way to improve.

Unfortunately, though, many times no one will comment on your story, or worse, they will comment vague platitudes like "Great! I loved it!" and "Keep up the good work!" which don't help you improve at all. Sure, you can always specifically request a critique from someone, but that's kind of awkward, and then you have to wait for them to actually get around to it, a process that may take any length of time, and even then there's no guarantee their critique will be thorough or helpful.

So (this has been the lengthy preamble to the following proposal), what if there was some formal system on CBW for requesting critiques? A CRITIQUE COMMITTEE, if you will.

I envision a group of volunteer critics. Whenever you write something, you have the option of adding it to the CRITIQUE COMMITTEE QUEUE, and then one of the volunteer critics will take your story and do a thorough sentence-by-sentence critique, preferably in a Google Doc or something where it's not taking up space on the wiki, and then linked on the story's talk page. Of course not just anybody could be a critic because, as is simply logical, you have to be better than the average CBW writer to be of any help to the average CBW writer. So the volunteer critics would be among CBW's most skilled writers (I have no idea how we'd define eligibility, but, you know, we could figure something out) who had volunteered to commit to a certain number of critiques a month. Of course, the more senior writers could also feel free submit their stories for critique. There would obviously be a length limit, because it takes a long time to do a truly thorough critique. This would most likely be in the range of 5000-6000 words (this would mean you could submit short stories or small sections of longer stories).

I'm not sure how much interest there is in something like this, but I would certainly love to critique and would love to be critiqued as well, so I'm putting the idea out there to see what kind of reaction it gets and go from there. If you would like to see a critique committee, and especially if you think you are pretty good at writing and would like to volunteer your time to be ON a potential critique committee, please leave a comment. Thank you for your consideration!