If You Can't Say Something Mean...

We all remember the line from Bambi when Thumper, while being chastised by his mother for his rude behavoir, repeats, at her urging, one of his family's Golden Rules: If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.

In general, I think we're a species that is programmed to be critical. Of ourselves and of others. Writer's, for the most part, are the worst of the lot. We agonize over every tiny detail in our own work, and when asked to review another's we give it the same kind of painstaking perusal we would our own.  At least I thought we did.

I've been writing since I discovered I could string words together and form coherent sentences, but sharing my work is uncharted territory that I'm just now exploring.

My first step was allowing my family to read my manuscript. However, after hearing from each of them that they found my story to be well-written and thoroughly entertaining (or in my brother Joey's case "good", as this seems to be the only adjective he is ever comfortable using), I was convinced that they must all be lying.

It couldn't possibly be good. Let alone flawless.

I found myself wondering if maybe, out of affection for me, they had chosen to heed Thumper's words of wisdom. And so I took the next step: I joined a writer's critique group. Then after months of excruciating arguments with myself over the worthiness of my draft and even the validity of my belonging to a group of writers in the first place, I posted a snippet of my manuscript.

Now, I am hard-wired to go into everything assuming the worst. This way when things turn out better than I expect, I find myself pleasantly surprised. In this case, however, my negative outlook proved correct. Some of my reviews were not favorable.

While at first there were cheers of "well done" and words like "intriguing" and "captivating" were used, the instant a negative comment was posted, the dam broke and the flood waters came rushing in.

It seems these groups may have a bit of a 'mob mentality', as reviewers following this negative post latched on, almost as if they were now compelled to judge my work in the same exact manner as the one before them.

"OMG. Someone said this is wrong, so it must be", seems to be a common thought amongst critiquers. We go into it expecting to find something wrong, and if we miss this something and someone else catches it, well then we're not very good writers, are we?

There I was, near to tears, knowing that as a writer I must face it. I must take it on the chin, shake it off, and come back for more (we are a truly self-loathing, masochistic bunch). So I decided to take thier criticism and try to implement changes to my story, but try as I may, I couldn't find the flaw the naysayers had pointed out to me.

Then days later, when my head swirled with thoughts like "if I can't recognize it, they must be better writers than I am" and "they know more than I do", a stranger went out of his way to be kind and told me what I'd wanted to hear all along: that my story was fantastic and that the others were merely being critical for criticism's sake.

I won't go into details about what he said, but to say I was shocked would be an egregious understatement. I'm from Philly. This is not behavior we're accustomed to.

I've decided to take his words at face value, if for no other reason than because he didn't have to write them. Days had passed, presumably I'd either taken the others' advice and moved on, or cried myself to sleep and declared I would never write again.

I think too often we writers think constructive criticism must be just that - criticism. We can't simply tell someone that what they've written is good. There must be a flaw. We know it. We just have to find it.

We adhere to our own adage - If you can't say something mean, you're not helping anybody. But, really, if we're being negative just to be negative, what good is that?