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...and what the hell does "supercillious" mean, anyway?
So, I'd like to learn how to be a better critic of poetry and prose- I want to be able to give helpful advice, and I'm always willing to read people's drafts, yet I feel as though there's something I'm doing wrong.
Once upon a time I used to do the worst thing ever which is re-writing shit for people. As Jack F says, that's bollocks- no-one's asking for that. The only time I can think of that being remotely acceptable would be if someone was writing a specific poetic form- a sonnet, say- and they had a word in the "wrong" place ("wrong" being a fluid concept most of the time but slightly more relevant when strict forms are involved). Even this seems dodgy, though.
What I often find myself doing is reading a piece of prose and then responding with, "You know, there's a really good writer called Nabokov who..." or saying, "You know who's good at creating characters? Graham Greene...", which I would imagine is also the wrong thing to do. I mean, my subject can't be expected to just buzz off and read these books because I feel they have a vague "something" to learn from them, can they? Although frequently, and I don't like this, but the only thing I can think of to say is, "read more books", or indeed, "stop only reading Kerouac"...
What I've been doing recently is what my tutors have done for me, which is to highlight a section and say "Why did you choose to tell it like this?", or, "Can you tell me what this means?", "What made you decide to use this word?"- but I feel this is very oblique and perhaps unhelpful coming from me. My tutors seemed to be able to say those things in a way that was enlightening.
I also wonder what gives me the right to criticse- so far the only thing I've had published was when I was ten years old. Does one need to be an officially "good writer" before one criticises another's work? That sounds silly, but still...
How do you criticise? |
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