I'm a writer who is fine with receiving critical comments even when I didn't remember specifically say so. Some other writers don't want to receive critical comments. That's fine. No unsolicited crit is not a universal norm, so any writer who cares a lot about whether they get critical comments should say so, whether that's saying please do or please don't.
You know, I’ve got a fourteen-year-old nephew who plays the violin.
He’s been playing it since fifth grade, and he’s going to be a freshman in high school next year. He’s at that age where boys are usually fucking assholes. Worse than that, he’s a nerdy boy, who’s into a whole slew of geeky things, which means he could so very easily fall prey to the Nice Guy attitude, but he doesn’t.
He’s a good kid. But because he’s so much like me, and has been influenced heavily by me his entire life, he’s a bit of a perfectionist.
On Monday, we went to an open house for parents for the high school he’s hoping to get into this coming year, and they had their orchestra playing. After their performance, as we were walking to the next section of the tour, he reiterated a point that I’ve heard him voice a few times before.
It’s hard for him to just sit there and listen to other people play the violin now. When he’s listening to the performance, all he can hear are the missed notes or if someone is scratchy or off-key or if they’re a beat ahead or a beat behind, etc.
He isn’t some virtuoso by any means, he’s just a fourteen-year-old that plays the violin, yet because he studies it, he automatically mentally critiques the performance.
I think we, as writers, can all relate to that. No matter how well we write ourselves, by being in this arena, we are automatically more sensitive to the mistakes others make. In fact, you don’t even have to be a writer; those who read regularly are prone to the same thing.
The thing is, though, I didn’t have to tell my nephew not to mock the students who were performing at the open house. I didn’t have to tell him not to criticize them or make fun of them, I didn’t have to tell him to lower his voice so they wouldn’t hear, and I definitely didn’t have to stop him from going up to them to criticize their performances to their face. It was something that was automatically understood; those things are impolite, and should he engage in any of those behaviors, he’d get in trouble for them.
And here’s the really important bit. Are you ready?
Not a single one of those amateur performers had to preface that performance by saying, “Please don’t.”
It was just automatically understood that their audience wouldn’t, because it’s not a thing you do in polite society when you are given something for free by people who are not professionals. Especially when–and this is also an important bit–you are also not a professional critic in any shape, form, or fashion.
My nephew waited until we’d walked away from the orchestra, where they weren’t in danger of hearing before he even began to discuss the very broad concept of how he critiques performances now because he’s in orchestra.
Somehow, without me having to drill it into his head countless times, this fourteen-year-old boy grasps the concept that you should not go up to someone, out of the blue, and criticize their performance just because you heard (or in the case of a writer: saw) their mistakes. He isn’t a professional, nor is he a teacher. He hasn’t been asked, he’s still learning himself, and they don’t know him from Adam.
On a fundamental level, he seems to get how entirely unhelpful his critique would be, and how the only thing he’s succeeding in doing is hurting someone’s feelings for no good reason.
I just think it’s funny how a fourteen-year-old understands that, but somehow, you don’t.
