Young Writers Society

The best criticism I ever received was on an English paper way back senior year of high-school. It had to do with something about Grendel, and I had a sentence that was along the lines of, "As has been shown above..." To this, my teacher to my great annoyance circled it in red and wrote, "No you haven't."

That annoyed to me to no end (and still does), but it's probably the single most helpful piece of criticism I ever received. Now whenever I'm writing up a memo, I always think of whether I'm actually backing up what I'm saying, and it's made me a much better writer.

What about everyone else? What is the best criticism you've ever received as a writer?

The best criticism I ever received as a writer was when I was 18 years old in my English Literature class.

I was writing a self-chosen essay on the comparisons of the portrayal of the family unit between Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.

I remember my teacher marking a draft with his scratchy pencil & shaking his head at, what I thought, was my most impressive paragraph. Apparently not. He said I hadn't looked at the scenery, gestures or expressions in the passage of Little Women to back up my argument at all! I was confused. Surely, all the answers I needed were in what the families were saying to each other?!

I learnt that the unsaid is just as important in writing - if not more! I now let all sorts of aspects of my writing do the talking for me…not just dialogue.

My most helpful bits of criticism were:

"Why is this happening in your story? You haven't explained this. Why why why?" (Encouraging me to think a story all the way through and get rid of bits I couldn't explain, didn't make sense, or had just been put in to force the plot to take an artificial turn)

and

"You know, if you planned your stories / essays out first, they'd be a lot better."

I have my parents to thank for those gems of wisdom.

The best piece of advice that I ever got, and I finally started to listen to is:
Get you spacing right between sentences. That used to be my weakest spot in writing, which is silly really but it's so simple.

So a lot of friend/reviewers have been telling me that, and so I actually decided to listen and start hitting the space button. Because of that now my writing has a more professional look to it, so if I did ever want to get published then I actually had a chance.

The next best piece of advice is: "Read read read other books so that you can improve on your writing." I really have taken that to heart, and now I am becoming a better writer since I like to read so much.

So yeah, those are my top 2 best advice that I have ever got.

~Peace Out~

The incredibly overused advice 'Show, don't tell' has been given to me by a senior writer before. I think that really exposed me to a new level of writing.

The best criticism I've ever received actually came in the form of a review by Jack (Firestarter) back in 2012. It went as follows:

Firestarter wrote:I think if you want to improve your poetry you should begin to look at the whole picture, rather than just line by line.

It has stuck with me ever since.