I’m retired, have much time and have had the desire to do things I have never done before or even thought about doing. I spent my career in math and never had the desire to write fiction.
I don’t expect anything from it and my ego is not on the line. I need a goal and so will try, but I don’t expect anything and it won’t crush me if/when it fails. In general, I have really enjoyed it. My writing had gone from terrible to maybe just kind of bad but I am improving. As part of the improvement process, I joined a couple of on-line critique sites. Oh boy. If you do that you better have thick skin. There are issues with them but if you use it as a tool with flaws one can get large amounts of good advice from them.
Another activity I have been doing is getting back into D&D and have run quite a few 5e campaigns. These two activities have gobbled up too much time but I have enjoyed myself.
In 5e, I have noticed that players don’t care about your world. They want to play the game THEY want to play. Players will not immerse themselves in your unique world. They come into the game with expectations that they came up with and don’t even seem to have read your information. Thank the heavens for session zeros. However, even if they get past session zero, they still try to play the game they want to play, world/situation be damned. Because of this, I have a “world” that I call Generic Boring World #43 and the players love it.
Back to writing. I have noticed this same phenomenon with a minority but a significant number of critiquers. They want to read the story THEY want and don’t seem to want to read YOUR story. They criticize and want to change it and each one of them is different. Their ideas also seem mundane/ I’ve seen this before. I have noticed that critiquers who are actually published DON’T do this and so I have taken to ignoring the former group.
Now for my question to you author folks.
5e…writing. It feels the same. You authors out there, have you seen this? If so, has it always been this way or is this something new?
[oldgeezer} Do kids these days feel entitled to the story they want and won’t take the story as is? [/oldgeeer]
I haven’t had the problem you describe with beta readers / advance readers. Hardly anyone complains that I didn’t write the story they thought they were going to get. Instead, people either finish it and give me feedback or they don’t. When I get feedback, it’s overwhelmingly positive and makes me feel good while also conveying a sense of what parts they liked the best, yet also pointing out parts that are confusing or inconsistent or redundant or badly worded.
Now, lit agents and publishers, that’s a massively different story. They seem to want the story they’re reading to be narrowly tailored to what they view as “the market”, and they are an impatient lot (mostly because of the sheer volume of stuff that comes across their desk). So yes, they very much do come across as “you didn’t write the story you were supposed to write, readers want such-and-such, sorry not interested”. Although they tend to word it more nicely than that.
I have always seen this sort of thing from critics. Especially film critics. They don’t review the movie as it is. They review how much the movie matches the one in their head-- the one you should have made.
What they and literary critics ought to be doing is, as you said, staying inside your world, and basing their critique on how well you accomplished what you set out to accomplish.
Try posting passages to ChatGPT or Bing creative and asking for a critique. Sometimes it gives you very good feedback. To get neutral, not excessively positive results, try a prompt like this:
"For this session, pretend you are a literary agent. I am going to give you random passages from a fictional book, and I want you to rate them and give advice for improving them to the fictional author. "
I haven’t seen that in the critique groups I’ve been in, but we are writing different enough stuff that it wouldn’t come up. Not all critiques are equally good. A good one explains why something doesn’t work, not just say it.
I found the initial exercises useful and interesting. I was particularly struck with the way the characters one’s created do start to run away with you, if you let them. But I didn’t keep up with the slog of observing and noting characters, and I couldn’t quite get on with feeling so exposed to the group’s critiques (let alone my critiquing other people’s efforts), and let it drop. But the structured nature of the course might help.
I followed this intriguing suggestion and asked ChatBot to critique some poems I’ve written. Got back some really interesting commentary-- a detailed analysis of the images, metaphors, themes, structure, and even suggestions about where the poems were weak and could be improved. The text sounds like a very good senior high school paper. I’m quite impressed. The ChatBot even named each poem (which I had not done). Very cool!
Not familiar with 5e, but I certainly have noticed that editors will seize on some detail in your world that has become a crusade for them and whomp it to the exclusion of the story. Or the rest of the world.
For instance, I once submitted a story in which I wrote about some action being a peril to the protagonist’s soul. The editor REALLY didn’t like that. What is a “soul”? they asked. Why is it important? Isn’t it an overused, ill=defined concept?
And this wasn’t a major point or anything. It was using a familiar concept to express an idea. I didn’t want to get into a major theological discussion that wasn’t even relevant to the story.
I’ve also noticed that several shared-world anthologies really don’t work, because different authors want to dwell on THEIR clever idea, and not play well with others. When the shared-world concept works, it can be great. Look at Larry Niven’s “Man-Kzin Wars”, which has been going for over a quarter of a century and twenty volumes. Or the two anthologies based on Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” books. But then look sat Medea: Harlan’s World and you can see most of the contributors playing in their own little ponds, removed from what was supposed to be the central ideas.