So glad you're feeling better! And so pleased to hear your thoughts!
Essentially, the way she proceeds in class and in her professional writers groups is pretty much the way you proceed in offering concrit.
Well, I took a lot of creative writing courses in college, and they were all workshop style--that is, we traded and read each others' pieces, left comments on them, then discussed them in class. While no prof specifically outlined the above as what you should do to critique, I took my cue from the way thr profs and more senior students critiqued.
I also learned from a pretty...weird lesson during one of these classes. What you say about people attending the classes wanting to be better and being willing to accept con crit...isn't, I think, always true. I think some people think they can accept it, but when they get it they just can't handle it. I just had this really bad experience in my first creative writing class ever, where I just ripped into this girl's piece and said a lot of things I thought were wrong with it, without saying a single good thing about it. I was very polite, and suggested things she could do to fix the problem, but I don't think she was in a frame of mind to listen to that after hearing what I had to say. I didn't know it at the time but I found out later that I'd made her cry and she hated me after that.
I think her reaction was a little out of line, but it made me think a lot about what I had done and what I should do if I really wanted to help people. And I came up with the above.
And I definitely agree about disliking the story elements not being valid criticism. In the case I mentioned above, one of the things I said about the girl's story was that it was like something from a poorly written romance novel. I went on to say why that can be a bad thing: purple prose, cliches, shallow characterization--but I think she got stuck on the fact that I thought it was Harlequinn-y and that I didn't like romance novels. I was much more careful in future to separate both story elements and genre from critique.
(What you say about SF was a big issue in that same group, too. A guy wrote an SF story. Since I read SF, and love it, I had all kind of positive things to say and all kinds of suggestions as to how to make it better. Almost everyone else was picking at the--as you say--conventions. There are certain things that can be a given in SF that allow you to work within an SF world. Sometimes you can play on that, but as an SF author you have a choice to incorporate them without that making it a bad story.)
I definitely think it would've helped if I could've ever been in a crit group where we all knew each other and knew what each other really thought about each others' writing. Insofar as fanfic, I am starting to feel that a few select writers know just how hard I fangirl their writing, and so I would feel far more comfortable dispensing with the niceties, as you say, with those people if called upon to do so.
Wow, long rant to say: omg I agree with everything you just said!
Re: Additional thought
Essentially, the way she proceeds in class and in her professional writers groups is pretty much the way you proceed in offering concrit.
Well, I took a lot of creative writing courses in college, and they were all workshop style--that is, we traded and read each others' pieces, left comments on them, then discussed them in class. While no prof specifically outlined the above as what you should do to critique, I took my cue from the way thr profs and more senior students critiqued.
I also learned from a pretty...weird lesson during one of these classes. What you say about people attending the classes wanting to be better and being willing to accept con crit...isn't, I think, always true. I think some people think they can accept it, but when they get it they just can't handle it. I just had this really bad experience in my first creative writing class ever, where I just ripped into this girl's piece and said a lot of things I thought were wrong with it, without saying a single good thing about it. I was very polite, and suggested things she could do to fix the problem, but I don't think she was in a frame of mind to listen to that after hearing what I had to say. I didn't know it at the time but I found out later that I'd made her cry and she hated me after that.
I think her reaction was a little out of line, but it made me think a lot about what I had done and what I should do if I really wanted to help people. And I came up with the above.
And I definitely agree about disliking the story elements not being valid criticism. In the case I mentioned above, one of the things I said about the girl's story was that it was like something from a poorly written romance novel. I went on to say why that can be a bad thing: purple prose, cliches, shallow characterization--but I think she got stuck on the fact that I thought it was Harlequinn-y and that I didn't like romance novels. I was much more careful in future to separate both story elements and genre from critique.
(What you say about SF was a big issue in that same group, too. A guy wrote an SF story. Since I read SF, and love it, I had all kind of positive things to say and all kinds of suggestions as to how to make it better. Almost everyone else was picking at the--as you say--conventions. There are certain things that can be a given in SF that allow you to work within an SF world. Sometimes you can play on that, but as an SF author you have a choice to incorporate them without that making it a bad story.)
I definitely think it would've helped if I could've ever been in a crit group where we all knew each other and knew what each other really thought about each others' writing. Insofar as fanfic, I am starting to feel that a few select writers know just how hard I fangirl their writing, and so I would feel far more comfortable dispensing with the niceties, as you say, with those people if called upon to do so.
Wow, long rant to say: omg I agree with everything you just said!