I've been told I'm a bit of a mean critic. I don't necessarily agree, but I won't deny it either. I was on the selection committee for Summer Gothic and Jared Millet, the editor, identified me as the Simon of the group; although he immediately added that every committee benefits from a Simon.
Criticism hurts. When you're an artist, you create a small but active conduit to your soul. And when the response comes back as anything other than positive, your nerves are exposed. I think it probably hurts more when you're first starting out, because your limited number of creations feel bigger to you than they do once you've plugged yourself into several outlets.
Case in point, I participate in Hoover's Flash Fiction Night every year. My first story was not very good. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that special. If someone had given me real criticism at the time, it would have been a lot harder for me to get up on the stage the next year. But now that I've presented about six stories, I feel comfortable taking the dreaded criticism about any individual piece because I kind of think I've got a knack for story telling. Maybe not consistently, but I've done some stuff that I feel pretty good about.
Criticism is inevitable and it's always going to hit a nerve, but if you're inviting an audience into your head you have to be willing to extend that invitation to the critics. If you're not strong enough to take it, how solid can your work really be?
But therein lies the danger of the trolls (who mistake themselves for critics) hearing the call. Trolls carry big clubs with spikes on them. In their minds, criticism is an actual physical force, and the strength of a piece's artistic merit is based on its ability to withstand impact. And after they've bashed your exhibit into the splinters of its former glory, and you've completely shut down for fear of casting your claim to adulthood into question, they then hit you with that harshest knee to the groin. "What? You can't take constructive criticism?"
To a troll, art is a concept that doesn't exist; and as such, creation is indiscernible. So when they say 'constructive', they're only using phonetic sounds that they've heard other people use to preface the word they really like.
So we all know what constructive criticism isn't, but it's a little trickier to nail down the conceptual core of what it is. Here is the en.wikipedia definition. "Constructive criticism is the process of offering valid and well-reasoned opinions about the work of others, usually involving both positive and negative comments, in a friendly manner rather than an oppositional one. The purpose of constructive criticism is to improve the outcome."
That's well and good, but the artist and the critic usually don't see eye to eye on what constitutes improving the outcome.
The first thing is, all criticism is subjective. We're talking about artistic merit, not proofreading, so we're in abstract territory. A critic can be wrong, and it's beneficial to the artist to keep that in mind. But the trick is, there's a subjectivity spectrum where one end veers closer to an objective-subjective (what was the artist trying to accomplish and how well did they succeed?) while the other end is subjective-subjective (how did the piece make me feel?) Tommy Wiseau's The Room is a classic example of a film that fails on every level in the objective-subjective criticism but has brought a substantial amount of pleasure to audiences of the subjective-subjective variety.
At this time, I would approximate that constructive criticism is 90% limited to objective-subjective. There was a classic story about Caroll Spinney, who we all know as Big Bird's performer. When Spinney was starting out as a starving puppeteer, he was giving a puppet demonstration where glitch upon technical glitch happened, leaving his performance unsalvageable. And on top of the feelings of defeat, Spinney came to realize that Jim Henson had been in the audience. Henson tracked down Spinney offstage, at which point Spinney immediately began to apologize for the performance. And Jim Henson said the single most objective-subjective sentence ever uttered. "No, I really liked what you were trying to do."
Constructive criticism hurts, but it's possible it can hurt in a positive way. Think of a personal trainer. Okay, now think of a good one. When they're helping you develop flexibility they're job is to push you beyond your level of comfort, but not to the point where you'll be hospitalized. A good critic will figure out what you can take, and give that pressure to you.
Another important element to constructive criticism is recognizing that a single piece of work doesn't have to be all good or all bad. I took an online creative writing course back in September and we all did peer reviews of each other. Many of my reviews went along the lines of "I really like the premise you have. This is the element I'm the most invested in... I feel like you're going this direction with it, and I would love to see this happen. But I wonder what would happen if you went that way instead."
Now I admittedly got a few stories to read that I felt my time being wasted by, and that's when I became the mean critic. There was one story that felt so lifeless that I really got the sense the author was just filling a word count. My temple throbbing response was "The biggest problem isn't that I don't care about your characters. It's that I don't believe you do either." It's exactly what I would have told Tommy Wiseau if I'd ever read his script.
But ultimately I think the wiki-definition hits the main point succinctly, in that the constructive critic wants the artist's work to succeed. The troll wants the artist to fail. Of course nobody is just one or the other. We all have the ability of being both types of critic. The Star Wars fan base is a perfect example. We all wanted to love the prequel trilogy. We were right to feel let down by it. We were right to criticize where it went wrong. But we overdid it. We hurt Ahmed Best's feelings. We bullied Jake Lloyd. And we shunned George Lucas away from his own franchise. A lot of good things may have come out of it, but it's not worth becoming trolls just to feel good in the moment.
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